The Lathe of Hell
by That-Hoopy-Frood
Summary: There is an old story... perhaps you've heard of it. A man falls asleep and loses his way on the journey through life. He encounters a poet and the two begin a series of travels through Hell where they witness the many punishments for those who disobeyed God during their lives...
1. Circle I: Limbo

But I, who'd seen the change in Virgil's complexion,  
said: "How shall I go on if you are frightened,  
you who have always helped dispel my doubts?"  
And he to me: "The anguish of the people  
whose place is here below, has touched my face  
with the compassion you mistake for fear." ( _Inf_. IV, 16-22)

* * *

Circle I  
 _Limbo_

* * *

Ten Years Ago

Somewhere outside East City...

"Who the devil are you?"

The visitor, a young man of sixteen, ignored the indignant demand as he peered curiously at his surroundings. It took little more than a cursory inspection to see that the old house was in dire need of repair. The size of it suggested a far more opulent past, but the garden had grown weed-choked and wild; the dingy brick walls were streaked with drippage from the leaky tin gutter that ran along the roof. The massive shutters, thrown back from the windows, were rotting away, pock-marked with perfectly equidistant holes... powderpost beetles, or perhaps termites. The young man couldn't be certain without a closer examination, and in any case, entomology was not his strength amongst the zoological sciences.

His gaze drifted past the shoulder of the one who had shouted, towards the first floor windows. Below the lifted panes, dusty lace curtains hung slack like things withering in the heat. Indeed, as the boy turned to the old man glaring down at him from across the threshold, a single bead of sweat roved lazily down his spine. He lamented the dirtying of his best suit, but it seemed the weather had denied him any say in the matter.

The master of the house, the young man decided, was much like the house itself. Despite his age, he cut an imposing figure. A wizened face peered out from under an untidy fringe of blonde hair, so pale it was almost white, as ashen as the curtains hanging in the windows. His eyes, a strange burnished colour like rust, were so heavily lidded and so weighed down with wrinkled folds that it was almost like talking to someone half-asleep, yet the young man could discern the house's master was quite alert. Even his manner of speech suggested some latent strength. If the young man were one to make premptive judgements –– which he wasn't –– or if he were given to formulating theories based on empirical evidence - which he was –– then he would have anticipated his arrival being met with the croak of old age. However, the old man's voice was more like a sergeant major's, formidable and impatient and distinctly upper class.

In the time it took the young man to paint a thorough portrait of the house and its inhabitant, barely a second had elapsed, not even long enough for the bumblebees to bounce to their adjacent flowers. He soaked up the minutia like a sponge. The young man supposed it was consequent of his ability to take comprehensive stock of his surroundings, to file the information away, and to summon every detail on a whim in the interim. It was imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create an image that rang true above all else. Even if his ability tended to discompose and discomfort, it was his to use as he saw fit. Besides, he cared for others' opinions of him. The benchmarks of detail were stored without fail in the vast granary of his mind, and crucial evaluations for the future made with ease upon consulting the archive of his memory.

He was an alchemist, after all.

Or, rather... he had every intention of becoming one.

"Good afternoon," the young man began, doffing a small grey trilby. "Master Hawkeye, I presume? Formerly of Eastern Polytechnic?"

The old man, one Berthold Hawkeye, sneered, ochre-coloured eyes narrowing in suspicion. "Who wants to know?"

If the visitor felt umbrage at the old man's rudeness, he gave no indication of the fact. Replacing his hat on his head of jet-black hair, he replied smoothly: "A recent graduate of that worthy institution, sir."

Distrust turned to doubt. "A graduate, eh? You can't be older than fifteen."

"Sixteen, sir. I earned my degree almost four years ago."

"In what discipline, boy?"

"Physics. The branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy."

Master Hawkeye stared at him, hard. There was a probing quality to the alchemist's eyes, intended, no doubt, to unsettle, though the young man merely gazed demurely back. He supposed he had to concede a certain logic in the old fellow's scepticism. Though the would-be alchemist was tall and smartly-dressed –– he would not settle for anything less, considering his company –– he presented a pale, sickly character. He was whey-faced and painfully thin. A diseased miasma clung to him like the sweat from the high, hot sun. He had watery indigo eyes parted in permanent half-lidded consideration that many mistook for being indicative of dull-wittedness. It came as little surprise, then, that Master Hawkeye had misguessed his age as well as his intention; the old alchemist was hardly the first, though the young man took the judgement in his stride. He firmly believed preconceived ideas and prejudgements lent him an edge in dealing with others.

The young man could use ignorance to his advantage. Master Hawkeye was no different: another potential wellspring of ammunition.

"What kind of energy is present in an unlit match?" the alchemist asked brusquely.

The young man replied with nary a pause for breath. "Chemical."

"When one leaves wine exposed to the air, the ethanol in the drink reacts with oxygen to form what?"

"Ethanoic acid."

"What type of fusion reaction predominates in the sun?"

"Deuterium and a single hydrogen proton to create helium-3."

"Pions and Kaons belong to which category of sub-atomic particles?"

"Mesons."

"Recite the maxim of Paracelsus's _Philosophia Sagax_ in the original Xerxian."

" _Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest_. 'Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.'"

"Why are you here?"

"I have come to learn alchemy," said the young man, unmindful of the sudden change in subject.

Master Hawkeye's lip curled, showing a row of browning teeth. "Indeed? I have turned away every upstart pup who has dared started sniffing around my doorstep."

"I am aware of that." Then, the young man added, somewhat insolently: "You possess a certain reputation for immoderate criteria in selecting apprentices."

Rather than rail against the slight, the old man nodded a quick affirmation, taken aback somewhat by his visitor's candidness. He pressed on, his words cold: "Then what makes you think _you_ , boy, have what it takes, when I've rejected scholars and academics of the highest standard, world-renowned practitioners of this sacred art."

The young man's heavy lids lifted slightly. "Because," he began simply; he felt his mouth curving into a thin slash of a smile, "I am better than them."

Hawkeye glared at him. "Many prospective students have come before me with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like some unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer their promise and their brilliance and their skill, competing as they do in a marketplace. But I have a right to remember how barbarically they behave when they grow drunk on the power alchemy can give them."

He breathed out through his nose, and Berthold Hawkeye started, not expecting the quick retort: "Drunk, careless, slipshod... inelegant. Call it what you will, sir... they _fear_ the alchemical knowledge you offer." The young man went on softly, but firmly: "And theirs is a fear stuck like a barb in the mind. Someone wise to their bravado is wont to attach strings to those barbs and make puppets of the foolish men and women who play with that which does well to defy their understanding. The power of alchemy controls the fearful. Only the _strong_ can take that power for themselves."

The young man tried to quench that thrill rising in his chest at seeing the old alchemist so rattled. But before Master Hawkeye could offer a rebuttal, a small voice sounded from inside the dilapidated foyer, along with the slap of bare feet on hardwood floors. "Papa, who are you talking to...?"

Despite his meticulous self-possession, the young man couldn't keep himself from arching an eyebrow at the sight of a tiny girl, no older than eight, toddling between the legs of the infamous and, reputedly, unhinged alchemist.

There was a long moment where the two newcomers did nothing but regard each other in silence.

The girl, boyish in physique, on the problematic side of malnourished, seemed to flounder in her ill-crafted, flower-printed dress, so much so she looked to the young man like a sentient stretch of wallpaper. The face peeking over a threadbare stole was pale and freckled. Her cheeks were blanched from her troglodytic life inside the house and her eyes partially obscured from the bangs of her short blonde hair, honeyed where Master Hawkeye's was bleached. She smiled in the way young children often do when they're masking nervousness.

She reminded him of a butterfly, but not the monarchs he used to skewer belly-up on index cards as a child. Of the living variety, with wings beating the summer air, alighting upon flowers, as pretty as painted silk and as delicate as rice paper.

Her eyes were crimson, quite unlike any colour the young man had ever seen before. Like two red lotus blossoms.

"I ordered you to stay inside the house," growled Master Hawkeye.

The girl peered up at the old alchemist –– her father, the young man realised abruptly: how interesting. "You said I could play outside..." she protested meekly.

The young man got down on one knee, until he was head-height with the child. "It's no trouble, sir," he assured the girl's parent, as smooth as plate glass.

Before Master Hawkeye could respond, stormy blue eyes met amber, and the young man smiled at the child. "Hello." He held out a hand. "What's your name?"

The girl stared at him, drifting closer to her father's trousered leg. She regarded him with a measure of calm and composure surprising for such a tender age, but then again, perhaps her exile in the old alchemy master's company had forced her acquaintance with a certain maturity. Indeed, as she sized him up, she seemed a child in stature only. As she observed him quietly, her gaze was almost as analytical as her father's.

However, the longer his hand remained outstretched, his pale, unblemished palm almost glowing in the noonday sun, the wider the girl's eyes grew. The young man's cautious smile lengthened, flashing his teeth briefly in a motion his sister had once described as being deeply unsettling. He supposed there was a certain truth in the observation, for unease seemed to blossom from within the girl as she met his grin head-on. Her hands quivered, and she wrung the hem of her tatty dress.

"Papa," she whimpered, blinking owlishly. "I don't like him."

 _"Riza..."_ Master Hawkeye rumbled a warning.

"Riza," repeated the young man, mulling the word over. "That's a very pretty name. Hello, Riza. It's very nice to meet you."

The girl ignored him. "Make him go away... he's scary."

Observant, indeed. The young man laughed good-naturedly, the sound ending in a rather harsh, discordant hiccough. A bout with pneumonia had turned his voice gravel-rough, an irritant, certainly, as he had an unparalleled fondness for the beauty and structure of sound. His proneness to falling ill had forced him to indulge his musical proclivities by alternative means.

In the brief moment following his laughter, the young man thought back to what the old master had said regarding the power of alchemy. In a way, teaching alchemy was comparable to taking on a student of music. The curricula necessitated the teaching of certain stringent disciplines while tempering the rigidity with the liberty of improvisation. Alchemy, like music, entailed an appropritation of the agoraphobic fear of true, unbridled freedom. An alchemist's ability to withstand pain, to harness terror, to transmute that terror into control, constituted true power. It was almost spiritual, holy, even it was masochistic, in a way, the piquant coupling of pain and pleasure he found so unerringly delightful, though he suspected he was the only one who thought about things in such a manner.

And the young man believed there was nothing easier to control than a person who trusted you, be that the alchemy master to his apprentice, or a shy, sad little girl to her father. They who placed their hope in your hands also placed their respect. What was truly fearsome, what was truly _exhilarating_ , about such delusional trust, was the prospect of a betrayal they didn't wholly anticipate, hidden within the white void of truth.

Well, the young man mused, a betrayal not anticipated by the _elder_ , at any rate. The girl, on the other hand...

Something about her bug-eyed distrust suggested she saw right to the core of him.

But rather than annoy, he found it amusing, and remarkably refreshing. He couldn't help but admire her powers of intuition.

Master Hawkeye raised a hand as though to box the girl's –– Riza's –– ears, for her impertinence. Before the old man had the chance, however, the would-be apprentice rose to his feet in one fluid movement, cutting through the motion of the blow before it manifested as such.

"I can see my company is not welcome at this time," he said brightly, eyes pinched in a well-meaning smile. "And I would hate to upset the young lady of the house any further."

Berthold Hawkeye sneered, searching, perhaps, for some deception in the young man's ascetic face. Finding nothing, the elder Hawkeye grunted noncommittally:

"If you're discouraged from study by the mindless whining of a single child," he said in disdain; the girl averted her crimson eyes in shame, "then you have no place under my roof, or partaking of my tutelage."

The young man, midway through doffing his hat in a gesture of polite farewell, paused. His heavy-lidded eyes grew hard. Cold. For a moment, the sweltering afternoon seemed touched with frost. "Perhaps," he conceded. Then: "Although, I can hardly keep my own council sharing a home with one so wise to flashes of cruelty, now can I?"

"I care not for––"

"Beg your pardon, sir... but I was not talking to you."

A band twitched in the old man's face as he rooted his jaw. The little girl at his feet looked up at the cocksure young alchemist with equal parts wariness and warning. The sixteen-year-old tipped the brim of his trilby to her.

"It was lovely to make your acquaintance, Miss Riza. I do so hope our paths cross again some day."

Master Hawkeye snorted in derision. Without so much as a by your leave, the alchemist turned and slammed the door in the young man's face. The last glimpse he caught of the once-venerable Hawkeye household was a flash of rust-red eyes, wide and earnest, though not, he realised, frightened.

Of her father... or of him.

What a remarkable young lady.

The young man turned on his heel and proceeded back up the uneven dirt path, over the viaduct at the edge of the property, down the hill towards the village center. Choking dust swirled in the dry, hot air, tussling the tail of his black hair, drawing his attention to the side the road, where a small pond lay baking in the afternoon sun. Butterflies, painted-ladies and viceroys, perched on the bright lotus flowers, drinking deeply of the nectar; their probosces extended like so many delicate black straws. Together, the young man and the insects swayed in the mid-July breeze, the motion all quite hypnotic. The combination of the intense red florets and blazing summer light shone brightly against the flat scum of the pond's surface, the explosion of colour dazzling to his eyes.

Reaching out a hand, standing absolutely still, the young man waited for one of the butterflies to alight on his skin. When one did, he held it there awhile, relishing the minute tickle of its legs and the soft brush of two furry wings. The splash of red clambered over his fingers, the heel of his thumb, his palm, planted itself there, like a tiny red bloom folded from origami.

With a self-assured smile, the young man's fist closed, crushing the insect in his hand. Its body seemed to hold no substance, disintegrating into red and black dust, like ash.

He wiped the mess on one pristine handkerchief, and proceeded up the path.

" _Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest_ ," he murmured.

"'Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself...'"

 **To Be Continued...**


	2. Circle II: Lust

"Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart,  
took hold of him because of the fair body  
taken from me – how that was done still wounds me.  
Love, that releases no beloved from loving,  
took hold of me so strongly through his beauty  
that, as you see, it has not left me yet.  
Love led the two of us unto one death.  
Caina waits for him who took our life." ( _Inf_. V, 100-107)

* * *

Circle II  
 _Lust_

* * *

1908

The Final Year of the Ishvalan War of Extermination...

"There is a time and place for you to showcase your filial affections, young man," said Grace Lambert Rosin. "And the mobile hospital during an autopsy is not one of them."

Pausing for a moment, she looked down at the photo –– which had been shoved quite unceremoniously under her nose –– then up at the man holding it, then down at the photo again. Certain she was not mistaken, she noted: "And in any case, I'm quite sure you showed me this same photograph yesterday, Captain Hughes."

The man beamed at her. Maes Hughes had a positively dazzling smile, almost blindingly so, to the point where Gray wanted to swap out her pince-nez for a pair of goggles.

"I know," he gushed, his cheeks flushed, and not, Gray suspected, from the heat; "but she's just so lovely I had to make sure she made the rounds a second time!"

"Try a _fifth_ time, Captain."

"Even better!"

"Have you never heard of familiarity breeding contempt, Hughes?"

"Welllll…" he drew the phoneme of the word out with no small amount of cheek, "any talk of _breeding_ where Gracia is concerned tends to end in a very different type of conversation!"

Absolutely incorrigible.

Gray sighed; she was beginning to suspect she was getting too old for the likes of Hughes and his peers.

She considered the younger man with a certain weariness, ill-accustomed to such indiscriminate frivolity even at the best of times. And the middle of a bloody civil war was far from the best of times.

Hughes was nearly 20 years her junior but several ranks her superior. The degrees of separation seemed to correct for themselves –– what Gray lacked in military clout she more than made up for in age and seniority. Though the nature of her work as a state alchemist ostracized her from many of the infantry and lower-ranking officers –– the men were leery of the alchemists, for reasons Gray accepted even if she didn't share them herself –– Hughes had formed something of a rapport with her. Having weathered the crucible of war, he was a more worldly figure than he had been upon their first meeting, but his face still showed that irascible curiosity, intelligence, and skepticism. He had a sharp inductive mind, even if his personality tended towards the sunny and his mannerisms the peculiar.

Indeed, though Hughes's lady friend seemed pleasant enough, if Gray had to feign interest in another photograph of Gracia Monroe, she was tempted to outsource incendiary services to one Roy Mustang.

The mere thought of the Flame Alchemist made her sweat even more. The large canvas tent, bereft of any substantial air circulation, did not help.

The pavilion served as the Amestrian mobile hospital. The station had arrived within a few days of the 27th Infantry Battalion's invasion of the Daliha District of Ishval and remained about ten miles behind the bulk of the fighting in Dairut and Kanda. The tent was close enough to treat patients quickly and send them back to the front lines in as short a space a time as possible. In a way, Gray preferred her hospital duties to her alchemical ones. Before the eruption of the civil war, Gray had served alongside Dr. Leonard Knox as a pathologist and coroner at Central General. With Amestris's larger mobile hospitals unable to assume their traditional role in support of the major combat units, Colonel Basque Grand had declared the chain of evacuation interrupted at a critical juncture. The interim solution had been to establish a location able to provide the necessary surgical services and care to the severely wounded directly behind the front lines. Otherwise, Gray suspected many soldiers would die from either the lack of life-saving medical intervention at the front or from the long and arduous evacuation through the desert from the frontal clearing stations to the nearest surgical units.

The arrangement suited her just fine: she could remain in Daliha, far outside the combat zone, and put her medical degree to some use.

Besides, Gray affirmed, Hughes forgotten for the time being: she much preferred dealing with dead bodies that _stayed_ dead.

Some of the grunts had taken to calling her the Gray Lady, the necromancer, the Golem Formator. It was unavoidable, she supposed. What was another silly title to a state alchemist, anyway?

"I would advise learning to compartmentalize, Captain," said Gray, looking towards the operating chamber of the pavilion and wondering what was taking Knox so long… "Perhaps it's better not to tarnish the memory of your young lady by dragging her into a war zone."

A strand of dark hair fell into Hughes's face, and he blew it aside with a sigh. "I can't say I agree with you there, Grace… being here is when I need her the most."

"You are not unique in longing for the company of loved ones in a place like this, Captain. But you don't see Giolio with daguerreotypes of his wife and daughters, nor Major Armstrong touting busts of his sisters, now do you?"

"I dunno, Alex is pretty handy with that alchemy of his. You see he transmuted a pile of rubble into life-size projectiles of his head last week?" Dropping the sarcasm for a moment, Hughes admitted, "I'd have thought you'd understand, Grace, being an alchemist and all. It's equivalent exchange, isn't it? With so much destruction and death, you need a little beauty every once in a while."

Gray thought the Captain was prone to overcomplicating otherwise uncomplicated situations. The current circumstances were no different. She intoned, "Many aspects of this conflict are vile just as many are equally beautiful. The only way for a person to maintain any measure of personal dignity is by exercising restraint, remaining true to their duty, and persevering under difficult conditions. That does not entail shoving photographs of your lady friend into my face."

Hughes stuck his hands in his combat coat pockets, frown lines chiseling the corners of his eyes. "You're a tough nut to crack, Major."

The observation surprised her. "Oh? I like to think I present a fairly uncomplicated character."

"Oh, you do," Hughes assured her. "And that's why I don't understand you."

"I confess I'm somewhat confused myself, young man."

He laughed. Even Gray had to admit it was a pleasant sound… better than mortar fire and transmutation energy, at any rate. "You're the sort of person who needs to be kept busy, Grace. Kept focused. You've got this singular attention to soldiering." She looked at him sharply, one green eye and one gray flashing, and Hughes corrected himself quickly: "Not as a matter of selfish expectation, though, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, you've been made to function best at a certain tuning. You can't do distractions, can you, Major?"

"And you find that particular personality trait perplexing?"

"No… just a little alien."

"Distractions invite carelessness which invites slipshod performance. Besides, insofar as your brand of distraction is concerned, Captain… I find it excessive."

Hughes's face fell. He wore somberness poorly. "Haven't you ever been in love, Major?" he asked quietly. There was no judgement in his bright green eyes, nor pity, for which Gray was thankful. He seemed legitimately bemused by her disregard for such things, and genuinely curious to know the reasons why.

"Of course… I am nearly fifty, after all. But I've never courted affection to the point where I carried around a projector reel's worth of photographs in my trouser pockets."

"And that seems in excess to you?"

"I rather think your attachments embody the definition of the word, Captain. There is a certain indignity to it."

"That's awfully cold."

"Not at all," she countered. "Maintaining one's dignity doesn't require you to fall out of love with someone. It simply means you won't allow their presence or lack thereof to guide your future. The moment your attachments suggest a derailment from your life purpose, from your duty, you have crossed over from love to desperation. You will water weeds and call it a garden."

Rather than argue, Hughes gave a low nod, the furrows on his forehead growing smooth. "I think that's where we're different, Major."

"I imagine we're different in a great many ways, Hughes. But please, enlighten me."

He folded his arms across the back of a chair, peering at Gray from over the tops of his spectacles. Despite the gravity in his words, his eyes twinkled warmly. "You believe in service. You consider remaining alive a primary concern on account of your being a soldier on active duty. You're not burdened with the obligation of judging whether any sort of personal preoccupations are worth maintaining. Because that service is a duty in of itself, so you're performing a good, moral act just by doing your job to the best of your ability."

Gray blinked. "At the risk of sounding ignorant, Captain, is that not the case with every soldier?"

"Well," he smiled, "your life purpose is your duty to Amestris, Grace. Mine… well. Mine's Gracia."

The Kaolin Alchemist arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. She supposed if Hughes's means of consolation enabled him to continue serving his country with every possible effort, then his reasons were just as valid as her own.

Though… she couldn't help but wonder if his kindness served him less as a comfort and more as a crutch, if this war, the violence and death, was not liable to swipe it out from under him and leave him floundering. He was a good man, Maes Hughes –– Gray believed that with her every instinct. But war so often failed to accommodate good men: good men tended to add the rogue variables of compassion and empathy in circumstances that failed to necessitate such things. Conflict, Gray affirmed, determines only who has the strength enough to do what needs to be done, and who doesn't. Who can survive, and who cannot. Who lives, and who dies.

"If you two are done chin-wagging…" came a gruff, bored voice from the other side of the pavilion, pulling Gray from her thoughts. She looked up at her fellow pathologist.

Leonard Knox was a leathery, unkempt man with a choleric temper and all the warmth of an iceberg. Gray noted several rusty bloodstains he'd neglected to scrub from his surgical whites, and no small amount of dirt and detritus and... other things –– caught under his fingernails. He slouched where he stood. He chewed idly on a toothpick, as though he'd forgotten he had it hanging from the corner of his mouth. Though a coroner and pathologist like her, Knox couldn't have been more markedly different from Grace Lambert Rosin if they came from separate professions entirely. Gray had the posture of a soldier. Every action she took was precise and purposeful. Whereas Knox griped and grumbled around his patients, Gray had a tendency to smile in the cold and distant way demanded by a certain decorum of professionalism. Where Knox shouted, Gray merely observed. Where he hacked, she sliced thinly.

But, Gray had to admit, there was no better army surgeon in the whole of Amestris.

"You're finished?" she asked, adjusting her pince-nez.

Knox grunted. "I wouldn't be out here if I wasn't, Major. Though I'll be damned if I know what the hell happened to the poor sonuvabitch."

Gray's mouth twisted in a frown. "That's disappointing to hear, Doctor. We were rather hoping you'd be able to shed some light on recent circumstances."

"I'm a coroner, not a soothsayer. Still, you'd better come in and take a look..."

Hughes and Gray exchanged a glance. Without a word, they followed Knox into the operating theatre.

The space was cramped, uncomfortably so, and Gray found herself brushing shoulders with Captain Hughes as they shuffled towards Knox's subject. For a moment, Gray's mind drifted to her uncluttered home flat in Central, everything spartan and pale with clean lines, elegant and calming; she banished the memory just as quickly, the distraction unwelcome.

She read the number on the toe of the body, regarded the once-living soldier in sombre silence, the boy reduced to a unit in Knox's morbid institution, a problem to be fixed on the world's slowest moving assembly line. Gray let her hand fall to the cotton sheet –– it, unlike most other things in Ishval, the mobile surgery included, remained clean, stiff, functional. The bed was more of a gurney, with wheels and collapsible sides.

The body's auburn hair was scattered in multiple places, stained with dried blood; crimson. His eyes had once been blue, but the glassy film had stolen away the color. His uniform, cut from him and discarded on a nearby trolley, was still bloody. Aside from a far number of bruises and scraps from having been fighting for months on end, the body looked relatively unscathed.

"He's just like the others," said Hughes grimly, running a hand through his hair and making it stick out in tufts.

Gray saw what Hughes meant, her eyes narrowing on the middle of the corpse's sternum. The bullet wound was a mess, as though the boy had been hit with two different kinds of weapon at once. There was the usual dark red hole, but also hundreds of tiny incisions –– like shrapnel trauma. The exit wound must have been on his back somewhere. If it weren't for that hole, and the fact he'd been under Knox's scalpel for the past several hours, the soldier could have been asleep.

"Thoughts, gentlemen?" prompted Knox.

Hughes snorted. "You two are the coroners, not me."

Gray pursed her mouth in a moue of consideration. "My initial prognosis tells me the man died from a single gunshot… he expired due to exsanguination and possible hypoxia caused by pneumothorax. However, the wound is strange. I can't say I recognize the caliber bullet used to kill him…"

"Nor I," agreed Hughes.

"He's the eighth such body to turn up in as many days," groused Knox. "I requested a transfer to Daliha thinking I'd finally be doing somethin' quiet, seeing as this sector's supposed to be secure n'all..."

"For all intents and purposes, it is," said Hughes, though the catch in his throat betrayed doubt. "We've established a permanent base here... Grand's moved the bulk of the invasion force to Ishval's final stronghold in the Dairut and Kanda regions. This district was meant to serve as a waystation for the alchemists until they were summoned into active combat."

Knox spat out his toothpick. "Waystation, eh? Then why the hell are Amestrian soldiers being shot like goddamned clay pigeons?"

Hughes's shoulders slumped. "I don't know. My superiors are clamoring for a report... and I don't know what to tell them."

"By wartime standards," said Gray thoughtfully, "eight deaths isn't much cause for alarm."

Hughes furrowed his eyebrows at her. Gray supposed she sounded rather cold, but the numbers game is a cruel one where war is concerned. Having to constantly bandage his bleeding heart was far more Hughes's personal problem than any concern of hers.

"It's more the weapon itself the higher-ups are worried about," said the Captain, still scowling. "This might be another case of Aerugonian gunrunning. Though selling munitions to Ishval is almost exclusively a supplementary rather than a primary source of income for the small number of organized criminal groups involved in the trafficking, there's always the possibility that arming the rebels, even in demilitarized zones, will be enough to drive Amestris back out of Daliha."

"And the fact that we can't determine the make and model of ammunition hints at a third party's involvement," finished Gray. "Especially when one considers that this district is purportedly free of aggressors."

"At the risk of stating the obvious, soldiers aren't supposed to die at their own billets," said Hughes, his glasses glinting in a slant of sunlight. "What's more, I don't have the authority to order a full-scale assault to smoke the assassin out, and this battalion doesn't have the manpower to hold this position if Daliha erupts into all-out war."

Though he did not say it aloud, Gray could tell Hughes balked at the thought of sending in an alchemist. Most of the state-certified dogs were deployed in the Dairut and Gunja regions, including Isaac, Tim, Alastair, as well as Basque Grand himself. _She_ could only act under the express written authority of Colonel Grand, which Gray knew Iron-Blood would be reluctant if not outright refusing to give. Strong Arm had been taken off active duty and was awaiting shipment home. Flame was too flashy, too ferocious, and tended to attract the wrong manner of attention. That left Major Kimblee, who had all the tact and subtlety of a bull in a china shop. Whenever he took the field, Amestrian soldiers had a habit of ending up dead right along with the Ishvalans.

Gray murmured, "Central is not known for their patience, Captain. They will have results, or they will have our commissions. And I doubt either option will prick Bradley's conscience to any great extent."

"I'm aware of that, Grace," said Hughes miserably.

"Then what are you gonna do about it?" prodded Knox. "Don't you think you outta first confirm the bullet came from an Auerogonian weapon before you go out there gun's blazing."

"That sure would be peachy, Knox," grumbled Hughes, irritably. "But if two of our best field medics can't figure out where it came from––"

"Field medics? For forensic analysis? It seems I mistook you for someone with vision, Captain."

Three heads turned to the entrance of the tent. Gray suspected her bad mood, which had worsened in proximity to Knox's corpse, was only going to get fouler.

"What do you want, Crimson?" asked the Kaolin Alchemist, masking her annoyance.

Her peer, Solf Kimblee, grinned like a hyena –– sharp teeth, greasy black hair and all. He pushed himself up from the tent pole and sauntered towards them, ponytail swinging jauntily. Gray wasn't sure how much of their conversation he had overheard. Knowing him, it was too much.

Knox regraded the young man like one would the piecemeal remnants of roadkill. Even Hughes, whose kindness seemed to know no bounds, looked hard-pressed for patience. "Your help isn't needed at the moment, Major."

Kimblee seemed not to hear him, or more likely, elected to ignore him. There was no love lost between Crimson and the Captain. "You want to divine who or what killed those soldiers? Then you ought to be asking someone who is an expert in such things."

Hughes's eyes turned beady, narrowing at the alchemist. "You wouldn't bring it up if you didn't already have a person in mind."

"I took the liberty of perusing the case file, as well as making some superficial observations of the victims," began Kimblee smoothly. Knox ground his teeth together and made as though to say something, but Kimblee raised a hand, flashing an array on one palm, and the coroner fell silent.

Gray didn't much care for Crimson –– then again, few people did. She was hardly unique in that respect. He was a vain, disingenuous creature, a glint of malevolence even in his smile. When he wasn't lobbing his deceptively silky, soothing comments –– or his violent alchemy –– he seemed scholarly and peaceful. All he needed was a skull on his desk and a lion at his feet to round-out the ruse. He wore his undershirt often, neglecting the uniform in the heat. It would have seemed slovenly if he didn't keep himself so damn clean. He had the deep, didactic voice of a man who'd suffered from sickness often as a child. Consequently, Gray thought he was far too skinny. He walked like his legs were stilts with a hinge at the knees. He was the type who romanticized the prospect of his own power transmuting into enlightenment, aware of the blood and suffering that had generated it in the first place... and simply not caring one way or another.

As Kimblee parsed through the particulars of their situation, Gray wanted to reach out and snatch the cold, thoughtful look right off his thin face. A strong slap might do it. She wanted to block those poisonous words from coming out of his mouth but Knox and Hughes were looking between the pair of alchemists expectantly and she didn't want to appear… rude.

Unmindful of her unvoiced considerations, Kimblee pressed on: "In order to avoid detection for so long, this mysterious assassin would have to possess a high degree of proficiency in camouflage and concealment, stalking, observation and map reading as well as precision marksmanship under various operational conditions, the environmental factors of this region necessitating an ability to consistently place shots within tight tolerances."

"Spare us your exposition, Major," said Gray tartly. Kimblee's pupils narrowed as his eyes rolled slowly towards her.

"Precision marksmanship," parroted Hughes, glaring at the alchemist. "You think our killer's a sniper?"

"Who else? Shooting his victims from a concealed position at a distance exceeding our detection capabilities –– targeting the billet from the ruins of Daliha, perhaps –– would account for our quarry's stubborn anonymity as well as his rather gruesome modus operandi. A high-powered rifle, no?"

"You said somethin' about confirming the make and model of the murder weapon," growled Knox; Gray could almost see the Doctor's hackles standing on end in Kimblee's presence. Gray suspected Knox had had to dissect a few too many of Kimblee's victims to feel in any way comfortable around the man.

"Indeed I did. This brazen act of aggression affects the entire company, Doctor. It would be ill-mannered of me not to lend my assistance."

Captain Hughes was not taken in by his honeyed words. "Who'd you have in mind?" he queried lowly.

Kimblee cocked his head and flashed his teeth in a leery smile. He seemed to relish Hughes's discomfort in particular. "I think she's on patrol at the moment… in her nest near the old water tower."

The Kaolin Alchemist could have sworn Hughes went as gray as one of her gollums.

"I'll go fetch her, shall I?"

 **To Be Continued...**


	3. Circle III: Gluttony

At which I said: "And after the great sentence –  
o master – will these torments grow, or else  
be less, or will they be just as intense?"  
And he to me: "Remember now your science,  
which says that when a thing has more perfection,  
so much the greater is its pain or pleasure.  
Though these accursed sinners never shall  
attain the true perfection, yet they can  
expect to be more perfect then than now." ( _Inf_. VI, 103-111)

* * *

Circle III  
 _Gluttony_

* * *

The dead soldier had been there a while.

It looked as though the desert's scavengers had been at work. The uniform had been torn from the body, the skin on its shins and thighs stripped clean. Its eyes and nose were pitted by burrowing insects. The corpse's milky eyes stared into the bright blue sky while the lip-less mouth hung open.

Cadet Riza Hawkeye met its gaze and said nothing.

The sun was high and hot, and the smell hit her like a slap in the face: the rank odor of cooked meat, of blood and sand and maggots. Her spotter, Charlie, turned away, clutching at his stomach, his nostrils flaring.

"What the hell..." he muttered thickly. "What the hell happened to him?"

Riza knelt to inspect the body. She waved away the flies –– fat, black things spinning in drunken circles –– and fought the urge to close her eyes to keep the insects from crawling over her lids. Fortunately, the scavengers –– coyotes or vultures, in all likelihood –– had restricted themselves to the fatty tissue of the thighs, leaving the chest relatively intact. Riza's hand ghosted over a hole in the boy's sternum, a puncture like those made by bullets traveling at tremendous speed. Judging by the excess of dry blood in the sand and the paleness of his skin, the bullet had punctured the aortic valve, shattered parts of the sternum. The soldier had bled to death in the street.

The young sniper frowned deeply. She touched the front of the man's uniform. Most of the blood was crusted dry, coming away rusty on her fingertips. The bullet had left a ragged hole, tiny cuts and burns peppering the skin around the point of impact like a spray of debris around a mortar strike.

It wasn't right. Sniping, done properly, offered a quick, painless death. A single bullet to the back of the head and the short drop into the darkness. But the assassin, whoever he was, had wanted to cause as much pain as possible. He had wanted his victim to suffer.

"He was shot," she told Charlie quietly.

The man ran a hand through his short black hair, dislodging sand. His sharp features glistened with sweat in the morning heat, but he, like most of the soldiers, had ceased to pay such discomforts any notice.

"It's not like any hit I've seen before," he noted, his voice grave, spittle accumulating in the corners of his mouth from the nausea. "If I didn't know any better, Hawkeye, I'd say the poor sod took a blunderbuss to the chest."

She _hummed_ in the back of her throat, her amber eyes still probing the body for clues. "Except his chest cavity hasn't been reduced to delicatessen. And despite the periphery damage, the wound is far too concentrated for a close-range pump action shotgun."

"You think he was killed at range?"

"Yes. This body is less than a half mile from the Amestrian camp; it would be madness to chance an engagement so close to the enemy."

Charlie inclined his head until it rested on his chest, his brows pinched in thought. "That makes sense, I suppose. Typically shot pellets spread upon leaving the barrel, and since the power of the burning charge is divided among the pellets, the energy of any one ball of shot would be too low to inflict this kind of damage." He grunted. "So... sniper rifle?"

Riza tilled and turned the possibilities over in her mind. She scrubbed an arm across her forehead, brushing the perspiration from her eyes. She mused in a small, tired voice, "To inflict this kind of damage, any gun would have to have a longer bolt to accommodate dimensionally larger magnum-length cartridges such as the .300 Winchester Magnum or .338 Lapua Magnum." The weight of her own sniper rifle suddenly felt terribly heavy where it rested against her shoulder. "The bolt head, locking ring, extractor and magazines would also be revised to work with the increased size and operating pressures of the rifle cartridges."

Charlie nodded. "I trust your judgement, Hawkeye."

As a sergeant, her spotter technically outranked her. But insofar as firearms were concerned, even the top brass referred to Riza' expertise. She liked working with Charlie in particular because, in addition to his sharp eyes, he possessed none of the other enlisted men's excessive and prejudiced loyalty to their cause... or their gender. It had been Captain Hughes who had given her her nickname, partly in jest, but Charlie took the epithet as gospel. To him, she wasn't a woman, or even a mere officer cadet. She was a sniper, and she was damn good at it. That was all he cared about.

The sense of inferiority was not banal or incidental when it came to soldiers of her particular sex. Both those like Charlie were possessed of a sort of patriotic grace that eschewed the politically cheap and manipulative views of most of the military. A grace that admitted affection and respect, encouraged them, even. That strove for a cohesion among the ranks, irrespective of the number of stars and bars on one's shoulders or the organs under one's uniform.

The man in question toed the blood-soaked sand. "What a mess," he murmured lowly. "It's funny... before all this, I had never really considered the Ishvalans a sadistic, vengeful people. I reckon it's because it's easy for us to vilify them. In a way, it helps to quiet our consciences."

"I don't have the luxury of that kind of detachment, sir," said Riza softly. Which was true. When she sniped unsuspecting Ishvalans as they ran from the fire and fury of the state alchemists, it was hard for her to think of them as anything but victims.

But the children of Ishvalla still had their teeth. The dead body at Riza's feet was proof enough of that.

She continued to parse through the remnants of the uniform, bits of the fabric beginning to brown, as though they had been held too close to a tinder box. Riza searched for bullet fragments in the sand, or embedded in the limpid white flesh. The ammo jacket must have been very thin, leaving an impressive hole but absolutely no identifiable bullet signature. Despite her earlier deductions, Riza could not definitely determine the weapon from the wound.

"That's interesting," she murmured to herself. She didn't realize she had spoken aloud until Charlie peered at her quizzically.

"Find something?"

"The bullet must have disintegrated on impact," she said grimly. "There's no way for me to identify the make and model of the gun used to kill him, but judging from the impact pattern, the bullet was traveling at very high speed. The angle of entry suggests the assassin had a clear line of sight, but chose to aim for the sternum instead of the forehead, forgoing a clean kill. We are looking at a highly trained sniper, one who seeks to inflict as much pain as possible."

A crease formed on the bridge of Charlie's nose as he said: "It's the same as those other soldiers." It was not a question. "The other eight men killed. This body is older, certainly, consequent of our not finding him until now. But he's victim number nine, isn't he?"

"Perhaps."

Riza had heard the stories. She had seen the body bags in Knox's surgery. The wounds of the dead men were all the same: a ragged hole through the heart, a shattered sternum, a spray of cuts and burns around the gunshot, and no traceable bullet fragments. Not even a lingering smell of cordite amidst the blood and the flies. Too many doubts had grown in the cracks of silence and suspicion: Riza knew her superiors were scrambling for answers, for solutions, and in the meanwhile, Amestrian soldiers were being picked off with an almost methodological ruthlessness and efficiency.

A far from ideal predicament. She wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the thought as soon as it crossed her mind. A lack of an ideal, of some fictitious portrait of one-sided military might, would not curtail the war's endurance.

Swallowing to keep from sighing aloud, Riza rose to her feet, readjusting her rifle on her shoulder. "Can you carry his body back to camp?" she queried Charlie and the two other infantrymen accompanying him –– she did not know their names. "I'll cover you from the rooftops."

"Are you expecting trouble, Hawkeye?"

"It doesn't hurt to be too careful."

"I suppose not." The Sergeant smiled wryly. "Roy mentioned you tended towards caution."

Riza favored him with a small smile. She knew she was continually doing it, flashing tight, bloodless little smiles as though trying to draw something over a deep, dark ache. She wasn't sure if she knew exactly what it meant, yet, but those smiles always made her feel so very sad.

Her memories of _him_ , those dark eyes peering back unwittingly from the other end of her crosshair, his mouth quivering with suppressed emotion as he sat across from her at a billie fire, were like old photographs in her mind: in his presence, she had taken only negatives, with every intention of developing them when she had at her disposal her dark inner room, the place where the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible threatened to manifest itself, the door of which was strictly forbidden to open for any protracted length of time.

But... ever since a pale, perplexing alchemist spoke to her of the importance of never forgetting, of taking pride in her skill as a killer, the door had remained shut.

And it would remain shut, Riza decided firmly. To protect him... to protect herself... she didn't know.

She kept telling herself she had more immediate concerns, and thought not of his face or name.

Riza forced her mind back to the task at hand.

From what little they had deduced about the assassin's movements, he never attacked in the daylight, but Riza had no intention of her company becoming the statistical outlier. Someone careless or ill-accustomed to the tedium of combat would be tempted to believe the wide, white sun offered an affective means of camouflage, but Riza had learned that there were always eyes staring through cracks and crosshairs and whispers that could not be wholly stifled. Paranoia, she supposed, was a specter with an insatiable appetite. But so long as she kept the monster fed, it wouldn't begin to feed on _her_.

She scaled the nearest building, using the empty windows as footholds, pulling herself up onto the flat slab of siltstone baking in the sun. The city glowed white, simmering in the morning heat. The air rippled and the desert danced. The street below curved like a bleached rib bone, stripped of its flesh long ago. All that remained was the stone itself: no glass, no wood, nothing worth scavenging. Even the ancient colonnades had been cut down and dragged away along with the trees. The knowledge that there were still personal effects behind the white walls, the sad afterimages of families too late to evacuate and subsequently extinguished, caused Riza's insides to cool and spasm. Weeks before, there would have been vomit in her mouth. Though her thoughts were quiet, they were not calm. There was a terror on the edge of her silent watchfulness, a terror fed by memories of burning flesh and the stench of death. After each recollection, Riza jerked back to the present moment, soaked in sweat, but bereft of tears. She found no comfort, no relief, in the quiet of the ruins of Daliha, because everything was still so damnably real. And the guilt was almost too immense to bear.

As Charlie and the rest of her patrol carried the dead man between them, constellating the street in rust-red like petals down a wedding aisle, Riza tracked them from up high, balancing along the gutters as she maneuvered between the rooftops. Her boots didn't make a sound. Under her white combat jacket, she moved like a ghost.

When she saw the green Amestrian flags waving from the billet, she moved to the edge of the roof, where the exposed foundations, the teeth of anchor bolts and re-bars, kept her from stepping out into the nothingness. From her position, she could see the entire western sector of Daliha. White buildings and white buttes rose beyond the thoroughfare. The towers vied to scrape the sky. The perspective seemed strange in the heat shimmers, the buildings leaning at drunken angles, more contorted the closer they were to craters from Amestrian mortar fire.

Riza crouched down. As she unwrapped her weapon from its bindings, she palmed the ground under her knees. The crumbled stone lay ash-like on the ground, a hot dust over every surface. There it would stay until the wind carried it away or the rain washed every little thing clean... which, being Ishval, she knew was not bound to happen in any near future. Like the end of that interminable war, the prospect of rain seemed a very distant thing.

She fixed her scope to the mount on the rifle. The break-away barrel connection was gas-tight, and she had enough experience to put the muzzle back in the exact same place with every subsequent assembly.

She resumed her watch over the encampment. Riza kept to the shadows of an overhang, so the glare didn't catch the barrel of her gun. She watched her fellow soldiers meander through the distant campsites, their features indistinct, silhouetted against the sunlight like cinders blowing from an inferno.

"Hunting for Eyes, Miss Marksman?"

Before the visitor had finished the thought, Riza pulled her rifle up to her shoulder and pivoted onto her back. She lifted her torso a few inches from the rooftop, and with it, her gun, resting the barrel against her knee to steady her aim at the figure standing in an empty doorway. Two tattooed palms rose in mock surrender.

A breath whistling from her nostrils, Riza allowed her elbows to sag, redirecting the muzzle of her rifle towards the ground.

"You shouldn't sneak up on someone like that, Major," she said stiffly, dropping her customary quiet deference as she fought to tame the tremor in her voice. "You're fortunate I didn't shoot you."

The man's slivered eyes glinted like broken glass. Though Riza was positively baking on the siltstone rooftop, the smile he flashed her seemed to chill the air. "You ought to give yourself more credit, Officer Cadet; you are far too disciplined to fire your weapon erratically at the slightest sound."

"What do you want, Major?" Riza caught herself: "Forgive my brusque manner of speaking, sir, but I can ill afford to be distracted from my watch. Not under the current circumstances."

"As it happens, I'm here _because_ of the current circumstances," said Major Solf J. Kimblee, State Alchemist. "This has been the ninth death in as many days. My superiors want answers, Cadet Hawkeye."

She didn't have them. "It's not my place to speculate, sir," she said carefully. "I was tasked by Captain Hughes to sweep the western sector of the district for any more victims. That's all."

"Do you know what killed them?"

"I can't speak for the rest, sir, but from what I was able to tell from the body we recovered… sniper fire, perhaps. A high-powered rifle." She admitted, with some difficulty: "However… I can't identify the specific weapon used to kill him."

The alchemist made a noncommittal sound. His bare hands, she noticed, were calloused, and he betrayed no outward sign of discomfort as he reached for a handful of detritus on a nearby windowsill, crushing the gravel and glass in a fist. The ash-like dust worked between his boots and the floor, grinding like the finest sand, churning the gray particles pirouetting in the air, silting itself with the sweat beaded on his brow.

To Riza Hawkeye, he presented an enigma. It was like looking at someone through a fogged-up window. His face was familiar to her in the same ways faces plucked from nightmares are familiar, one whose features dissolved as soon as she attempted to recall them.

"Surely," he began, yanking her attention from her examination of him, "nine dead bodies is amble evidence to provide some manner of insight?"

Riza was not a proud woman, but she had experience enough to know when someone was expressing some doubts regarding her expertise. "I'm a sniper myself, sir," she reminded him, purely to humble him, as if his memory were somehow the thing under question. "If there was any way to trace the ammunition, the assassin would already be in our custody. I know my bullets, and I know my guns."

"My thoughts precisely." Kimblee inclined his head to her in a small concession. His lips seemed fixed in a permanent long, narrow curve; however, when something struck him as particularly amusing, Riza reckoned his smile would have gone on for a while if it could. "We're dealing with a man who operates beyond the province of your considerable firearms knowledge, Cadet."

"So it would seem, sir."

Riza became aware, suddenly, that Major Kimblee hadn't blinked in what seemed like the past several minutes. That, for all the scrutinizing she had done of the alchemist, the alchemist had done his fair share of _her_.

The realization of his objectification of her, and her obliviousness of it up until that point, churned Riza's guts. Kimblee must have deduced something from the sudden souring of her expression, because he noted amiably:

"Your countenance reflects the sentiment that you "should have done something more" to prevent the deaths of these soldiers... am I right?"

Something about his manner of asking told Riza he didn't expect her to answer in the negative. His inflections went beyond the purely rhetorical... they were downright self-determining.

"Yes, sir," she said quietly. "It is the duty of any soldier to protect his fellows. I have no wish to see my comrades die."

"And here I was expecting combat to have numbed you to the reality of such things."

"It was you who ordered me to never forget, Major."

He seemed pleased as punch by that, and Riza couldn't help but think she'd inadvertently stuck to some script he'd had prepared inside his head. "So I did. I suppose your anxieties reflect, then, some underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that _could have been done_ in the first time –– a comforting thought that decoys you from your pathetic helplessness in the face of death."

"Because death is entirely impartial, sir," countered Riza, before she could stop to consider the possibility that he _wanted_ her full participation in his labyrinthine philosophizing. "It doesn't have a habit of guiding us towards its intended victims, so we are helpless in anticipating its strategy."

"I tend to disagree, Miss Marksman," he said smoothly. He lifted a hand in the air, almost flippantly, flashing a deadly inked crest that made the hairs on Hawkeye's neck stand on end. "Death is a mistress who likes to dance along fate's boundaries and give false hope of a true end. I suspect the fickle bitch doesn't like me all that much. And it seems she doesn't care much for you, either..."

Riza said nothing. The metal fixings of her rifle began to burn against her palm, so she adjusted her grip.

"Her hunger for you cannot be sated because your taste has turned to dust in her mouth."

She, still, remained silent.

Seemingly resigned with being denied an answer, Major Kimblee seemed to change the subject. He looked past her shoulder towards the Amestrian camp and mused aloud: "It's some small wonder that Captain Hughes hasn't seen fit to do anything to rectify this most unfortunate situation. As my superiors are currently preparing to bring the full might of the Amestrian military down on Dairut and Kanda, Daliha and its medical stations fell to Hughes, and all the Captain has to show for his management are nine deaths in nine days… the same killer, the same untraceable weapon. It is rather damning, isn't it?"

Riza looked at the alchemist sharply. Maes outranked Kimblee: the Major's impertinence bordered on the seditious, but Riza thought it best to keep such thoughts to herself. Though she barely knew the man, and though the number of her interactions with him could be counted on one hand, she didn't like Kimblee. She didn't like his strange curiosities, his cyphers, his hungers, his thirsts, all particular to himself. She didn't like that she didn't understand him with the same degree of depth he understood _her_. He was vain. He was cruel. The joy he took in his destructive alchemy turned her stomach, and the way he leered at her when he thought she wasn't looking made her flesh crawl.

Riza didn't relish the thought of provoking him. He was as volatile as his explosions, and just as dangerous.

"We are not engaged in outright combat at the moment, sir, which is what makes these attacks so unusual, and so brazen. Since most of our martial units are currently engaged in the East, the Captain can't allow this region to break into all-out conflict." Or risk jeopardizing the uneasy peace by letting _your_ insane alchemy loose upon the city, she wanted to say, but didn't. "We have no way of knowing if this assassin is a lynchpin for a greater assault. In the absence of Colonel Grand, Captain Hughes is waiting for word from Central Command."

"Fortunately, he no longer has to."

Riza's eyebrows knitted. So far as she knew, Maes had agonized over penning his report to his superiors for the past several days, but he had never actually gotten around to _writing_ the damn thing.

Kimblee went on, taking her bemusement in his stride: "The word is the Führer's official courier is currently en route to base camp right about now." Kimblee paused, cocking his head to his shoulder. They heard a bell sounding over the city, tolling eight times. "And it seems as though you've just been relieved of duty, Miss Marksman. What auspicious timing."

She frowned. "So it seems, sir." Riza relaxed her grip on her rifle, but she didn't reach for her bindings.

She followed Kimblee as he descended down the stairwell of the abandoned tenement, emerging into the city with a lightness of step Riza did not share. Pushing through the debris, she filled the space a few paces shy of his back. The position made her hush, and not just her breathing and her heartbeat but every part of her, as though she was feeling a silence deep in her stomach, an almost physical nausea…

Some unnamed, unnatural feeling tickled at the back of her throat, not unlike the sensation of swallowing sand, as she stared at Kimblee's wiry back, as though what she was looking upon was in some way unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything seemed stretched and bent in all the wrong directions.

The Major was tall and rake thin; if Riza tried peering at him from the corner of her eye, she couldn't see him at all. His white combat jacket, still immaculately pressed, simply faded into the heat shimmers. She watched him, and she wondered, amidst the blood and sweat and flies, just how the Crimson Alchemist kept his uniform so clean...


	4. Circle IV: Avarice

So did they move around the sorry circle  
from left and right to the opposing point;  
again, again they cried their chant of scorn;  
and so, when each of them had changed positions,  
he circled halfway back to his next joust. ( _Inf_. VII, 25-36)

* * *

Circle IV  
 _Avarice_

* * *

Maes Hughes kicked a rock by the side of the fire pit. The chunk of siltstone was heavier than it looked, and didn't budge as his toe made contact. Hughes yelped, hopping on one foot, knowing he'd be rewarded with a nasty bruise for his trouble. He thought taking some of his frustration out on the local scenery would make him feel better.

It didn't.

"What'd that pebble ever do to you, Hughes?"

Maes scowled at the alchemist sitting a short distance away. "It just happened to be the thing lying in my path," he grumbled, his toe beginning to throb. After a moment, he added: "If I were a few steps closer it would have been your shin, Roy."

The Flame Alchemist, Roy Mustang, lifted his head from his coffee tin, his brows pinched in a frown. "I wasn't going to ask––"

"But you will anyway."

"–– how did the meeting with Knox go?"

"Oh, swell." Maes landed on his ass, crossing his arms. He knew he was pouting, but he didn't care. "Just golden."

Rather than indulge the sarcasm –– which, Maes had to admit, was a bit thick, even for him –– Roy's dark eyes drifted to Hughes's left, at the second alchemist in their company who, up to that point, had been making a concerted effort to ignore them both.

Grace Rosin wore a tight little frown –– for someone who was usually as demonstrative as wet concrete, the sour expression told Maes she was pretty pissed. A pair of mismatched eyes, one green and the other gray, peered up at the Flame Alchemist as he continued to glare at her.

"What happened?" prodded Roy.

Grace took a deliberate swallow of coffee. She seemed to be the only one of them who could stomach cups and cups of the stuff. Roy only partook to keep himself standing upright, and Maes didn't touch it at all –– gave him bellyache.

"Interference." Grace's voice was carefully modulated, intended to calm, but Maes didn't miss the fact that the look in her eyes was less than friendly. Regardless of the circumstances, the Kaolin Alchemist always seemed to present a stiff, austere presence, a singularly serious and self-contained bearing, as punctual as a stopwatch and as warm as an icebox. "Evidently, Major Kimblee thought the situation warranted a third opinion."

Roy's jaw rooted, something hard and angry straining his features. He looked as though he wanted to pry; Maes only hoped he wouldn't. If the thought of Kimblee slinking off to find Riza made _him_ squirm, Hughes could only imagine how the prospect would make Roy feel.

Maes noted his friend's clenched fists where they rested on his knees, his knuckles pewter white. His eyes looked hard and flinty. Maes disliked Major Kimblee; Roy Mustang positively _loathed_ him. Hughes suspected it was more than a little ambitious rivalry, more than a couple pompous State Alchemists going at each other like two ornery roosters in the barnyard. The two men were too different for that. Despite the similarities in their alchemy –– at least, what _seemed_ like similarities to Maes's limited knowledge of such things –– they both had very different ways of doing things. Roy was armed with a resilient, albeit damaged, sense of justice, burdened with a painful awareness of the suffering he caused, whereas Kimblee's own actions never seemed to prick whatever conscience he was reputed to have.

Still… sometimes Maes couldn't help but think the two alchemists were the same person born into two different worlds. Not that he'd ever tell Roy that, of course.

After a long, tense pause, Roy changed the subject: "Knox told me all the soldiers were shot once, through the heart. He said the front of their uniforms and the skin of their sternums were pockmarked with debris."

Maes sighed. "Yeah... seems the weapon this guy's using is powerful enough to char flesh on impact. Not pleasant."

Roy went rigid for a moment, before resting his head on a fist, nodding in silent, sullen agreement. It took Maes a few seconds longer than it ought to have done, but then the realization hit him, and the Captain had to curl his toes in his boot to keep from kicking himself for his thoughtlessness.

Of course: burnt flesh would be something Roy Mustang was intimately acquainted with. The smell of it seemed to hang around the Flame Alchemist like body odor and cigarette smoke seemed to hang around the rest of them.

"Regardless of how he's doing it," continued Hughes, banishing the maudlin thought to the back of his mind, "this guy's becoming a right pain in my ass. I may just have to swallow my pride and ask for permission to send you in, Roy."

"I don't remember taking orders from you," said Roy. Grace sipped her coffee but remained stubbornly aloof.

Maes glared at him. "I'm splitting my sides. Look, I'm liaising between Basque Grand and this medical station, and let me tell you, if it turns out Bradley wants you to burn the whole damn city to the ground to find this guy, then it doesn't particularly matter who the order is coming from."

"Then why not just save yourself the trouble and give the order yourself?"

Grace set her coffee down on a nearby rock. "Because I imagine the Captain doesn't particularly _want_ you to "burn the whole damn city to the ground." I for one quite like breathing air that doesn't smell like cooked corpses."

Maes found himself hard-pressed for patience. He had a stubborn fondness for the old woman, and though she meant well with her prodigious lack of bullshit, at times she had all the tact and delicateness of one of her reanimated golems. "You know, Grace," he muttered, glaring daggers at the alchemist, "I've never said you didn't have a heart, but it sure would be nice if it beat every once in a while."

She adjusted her glasses. "Mixed metaphors aside, I notice you're not disagreeing with me."

Rather than get dragged into an argument, Maes looked sidelong at the Flame Alchemist. Roy had taken to staring at the reflection in his coffee.

A fierce sadness clawed at Maes's heart at the sight.

When Hughes had first encountered the cocksure, careless boy at the academy, the first thing Maes had noticed were Roy's eyes, the darkest black, and so _alive_ , moving here and there and then staring straight on, with such focus and determination it had taken Maes's breath away. But, as the two friends sat across from one another in the Daliha camp, Hughes noted a bruising rimming those eyes, like Roy hadn't slept well for too many days, as though someone had punched him just hard enough to leave a little black, quarter-moon smudge under his lids. Parts of his hair had been singed. He looked thin and haggard, and his white coat hanging from him like an oversized bedsheet. Maes couldn't help but wonder if in some way the desert was slowly eating Roy up, eroding him away.

He was tired, but it wasn't merely fatigue, although it continued to worry the Captain how utterly _exhausted_ Roy looked all the time. It was, Maes supposed, a strange sense of something missing, of feeling alone and lost irrespective of his company.

As though everything, the entire world, the entire war… was wrong.

"Look on the bright side," said Maes; the effort was weak, but dammit if he wasn't going to wipe that miserable look off his best friend's face: "Cadet Hawkeye went off duty at nine… after her debrief, we'll see if she can shed some light on our little sniper problem."

"Tell me something, Hughes," muttered Roy, "was Hawkeye the third opinion Crimson went looking for?"

Maes felt Grace's eyes on the side of his head, boring holes into his temple. "I'm not sure," he lied. "He didn't mention her by name, but…" he trailed off.

"This is her area of expertise," murmured Grace, her tone wholly ambiguous. She addressed Maes as though Roy wasn't there at all. "Forgive me for saying so, Captain, but after the past quarter-hour's conversation, I remain unconvinced that you possess the sense and sensitivity to break that particular news to Major Mustang in any objective fashion."

Maes spluttered: " _I_ lacked the sensitivity!"

"And sense," she reminded him.

"I suppose it doesn't really matter _who_ asks her," said Roy cooly, glaring at them both in irritation. "The sooner we weasel our ways out of this shit-show, the better."

Maes's eyes widened, the green twinkling as a sudden sunny thought occurred to him. "And then we can go back to thinking about more positive things… like a certain someone waiting for me back home in Central! Look here, Roy, I got some new––"

Grace rounded on him. "Captain, if those pictures leave your pocket, I will pour this coffee all over them."

Hughes froze. Anyone else may have been naive enough to interpret the threat as a joke, but Grace Rosin didn't have a sense of humor.

Roy's face fell; he let out a ravaged little sound Maes hesitated to call a laugh. "You sure hold on to your happy future with some tenacity, Hughes."

Maes shrugged. "Sure beats gabbing about Ishvalan snipers and Major Kimblee." He thought for a moment, his smile smoothing into a frown of consideration. "Say, Roy… you've never really told us what you've got to look forward to, have you."

Roy glowered. "Why don't you ask Gray instead, if you two are so chummy?"

"When this war is over," said Grace without preamble, "I intend to relinquish my state commission, return to my employment under the Osterhagens as their son's alchemy tutor, finish my novel, and take up piano."

 _That_ sad attempt at derailment out of the way, Maes looked expectantly at the Flame Alchemist. Realizing there was no way for him to skirt out from under the line of questioning, Roy sighed.

"Right now…" he propped his forehead on his thumbs, looking forlornly at the edge of camp. "I can't say I really have any positive vision of the future. I don't know what kind of world I'd someday like to live in or if it's even possible to achieve something better than this. I only know that the enemy is attacking us, again and again. And when you're attacked you must fight back, in whatever way you can."

Next to Maes, Grace gave a curt nod. Hughes figured she fancied that sort of talk, all duty and necessity and equivalent exchange, the typical crap alchemists enjoyed harping on like a bunch of out-of-tune, well… harps.

Hughes countered: "But some miserable Ishvalan is probably making that same argument, isn't he, Roy? Probably thinking the measures our military is taking serve no other purpose than to increase our own power and debase all other forms of life. So they rise up. They fight back." Maes shook his head. "No… what I wanna know is what keeps _Roy Mustang_ looking ahead?"

"Truth be told, Hughes, I don't know if I can see that far." His black eyes closed. "The clouds are a little too thick on that particular horizon."

Maes shrugged. "Sometimes clouds aren't weightless, Roy. Sometimes their bellies get dark and full. It's life. It happens. And it doesn't mean it isn't scary, or that I'm not afraid, but now I know that as long as I'm standing with Gracia when those clouds break, I'll be alright. We'll get rained on together! Knowing Gracia, she'll have a big umbrella to shelter us from the worst of it." Maes smiled to himself. "That's the kind of uncertain future I can handle."

Hughes didn't know why he shared the things he did… he didn't know why he looked at Roy Mustang with such earnestness, begging for his friend to listen, begging to be believed. He knew that Roy's uncertainty of the future, the fear of the unknown was constantly nipping at his heels, almost to the point of phobia. Maes knew the Flame Alchemist felt as though he was going down a stairway, constantly missing steps, throwing fireballs in a sad attempt to light the way, hurtling into the darkness with no idea where he would land.

"Sirs!"

Finally, Roy looked up from the dirt. Something brief and bright flashed in his dark eyes –– but the flicker of life was so brief Maes thought he had imagined it. The Captain and the two alchemists turned to face their visitor

Riza Hawkeye's was a very young, very defiant face, pulled taut by an odd sense of detachment... and fear, too, Maes suspected. Thin lips locked in their secrets. Fatigue chiseling lines into her forehead. And those extraordinary eyes, crimson until the sun caught them at a certain angle and turned them the color of whiskey. What memories lived in them that she could not share, Hughes wondered.

Another one of the snipers –– Hughes was pretty sure his name was Charlie –– trotted a short distance behind her. The Cadet and the Sergeant fell into parade formation in front of the Captain.

"Mission report, Cadet," ordered Hughes.

"Sir," Riza stood a little straighter, "we recovered a body in the easternmost sector of the Daliha District. The soldiers accompanying me identified the man as Cadet Sander Akron, 27th Infantry Battalion. Cadet Akron was scouting the area for Ishvalan guerrillas when he was attacked."

Maes's cheeks flushed. "Oh for the love of… I gave express orders that no one was to scout the sector without an alchemical escort! The man was asking for trouble." He got his temper under control with some effort. "This whole situation is making me look like a right ass. I'm in it up to my eyeballs, gentlemen. If we don't smoke this guy out soon, Bradley'll come down here and section me himself. And Basque Grand will probably help him."

"There is always our first option: I could destroy that entire section of the city," said Roy quietly. "That would almost certainly kill anyone hiding there."

The Flame Alchemist didn't sound particularly enthusiastic. Maes couldn't blame him, and he couldn't help but notice that Cadet Hawkeye, for all her irreproachable discipline, had taken a profound interest in everything _other_ than Roy Mustang.

Sergeant Fuller –– Charlie –– nodded solemnly. "An effective, if brutal, course of action, sirs."

"For all we know, there are humanitarians quartered in the city," argued Hughes. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself rather than his subordinates. "There's word the Rockbells are in Ishval. I don't want to be responsible for the unnecessary deaths of Amestrians."

"Amestrian are already dying, Hughes," countered Roy, the roughness of his words failing to match the profound sorrow in his eyes. "The situation is too uncertain to think about it in terms of outcomes. It's a bet, and evaluating it as good or not must depend on the stakes and the odds, not on the result." He let out a chest-deep sigh. "And my reason tells me that if we were to make a move right about now… the odds work more in Amestris's favor than against it."

Maes felt inclined to agree with him, although a part of him hated himself for it. The only grain of reassurance he allowed himself was the thought that taking more lives would somehow end the war sooner rather than later.

At his side, Grace had gone very quiet. Riza was the first to notice.

"What are your orders, Major Lambert-Rosin?" she asked quietly.

The sun reflected in the alchemist's small, round glasses, two golden orbs where her eyes ought to be. The hand that wasn't holding her mug of coffee went to her pocket, removing a wrinkled sheet of paper.

Hughes felt something somersault in his gut when he saw the Führer's seal on the center fold.

"Grace, what's that?"

All eyes fell on Kaolin. She met their accusatory stares head-on and said calmly, coolly, "It's a cable from Central Headquarters. I received it not long after our meeting with Dr. Knox."

Fury burned like indigestion in his gut. Maes's voice lowered dangerously as he rounded on Grace. "When were you planning on telling me this, Major?" he snarled.

She lowered the telegram to stare at him, blinked her heterochromic eyes. Wisps of white hair that had come loose from her bun threw shadow splinters across her face. "You didn't ask. And in any case, the telegram was addressed to me."

"When it concerns _my soldiers_ ––"

"What does it say, Gray?" interrupted Roy, shooting Maes a cautionary look. Hughes simmered.

"Well," she gave the cable another superficial inspection, "according to Storche, there is already a counterattack plan in place. This is out of our hands now, sirs."

"Whose plan, Major?" asked Charlie.

Grace opened her mouth to say something, then, in a most uncharacteristic show of hesitation, closed it again.

Roy's dark eyes narrowed. "With Basque Grand leading the attack in the Gunja District, Hughes is the commanding officer in this sector. If he isn't giving the orders, then who is? Who would have the audacity—"

"Try Bradley."

"Central has no direct control of operations in this district! This is not an active combat zone!"

"There's a chain of command we have to obey, Flame."

Riza, meanwhile, had taken two discrete steps away from the assembled officers. She seemed keen to avoid the bickering. "Excuse me, sirs, I must debrief my replacement."

"Just a moment, Cadet Hawkeye," said Grace, ignoring Roy, making Hawkeye freeze mid-stride. "I haven't dismissed you. Your orders have changed."

"Sir?"

Grace paused again. Maes hated that pause; he knew it all too well from his time spent with the State Alchemists. They could be a slippery, conniving bunch when the mood suited them… even Roy had his silver tongue. They tended to implement such pauses when they were adjusting the truth or trying to decide how much of it their subordinates needed to know.

"This command comes down from Führer King Bradley himself," she began. "He wants our best counter-sniper to bring down the aggressor." Grace looked at her over the rims of her glasses. "You're young. From what I understand, you weren't even done your academy training when they shipped you out here. But you're the best. I think your record speaks for itself, Hawkeye."

Riza couldn't argue. "I believe it does, sir."

"Hold on a moment, Major," Roy broke in; Maes quirked an eyebrow at him, "the last time someone scouted Daliha on their own, Cadet Hawkeye's team had to drag his corpse back to base camp."

Kaolin looked as though she had tasted something unpleasant. "That's why Cadet Hawkeye won't be going alone. Bradley ordered an alchemical escort for her. A crack team of our best counter-sniper and our most skilled alchemist will enter Daliha undetected and eliminate the assassin before any more Amestrian lives are lost."

Charlie nodded. "A good strategy."

Roy seemed to unwind a little. "That sounds reasonable. I can be combat ready in––"

"I hate to be the one to temper your enthusiasm, Major Mustang," said Grace, "but you are not Bradley's selection."

"What? You, then?"

"My particular brand of martial alchemy is ill-suited for this sort of thing."

"Then who?" demanded Maes.

"Our leader seems to think the Crimson Alchemist is the more qualified candidate."

Hughes realized clenching his fists had begun to hurt his joints a great deal. He uncurled his hands and the sudden release of nervous tension, combined with the ugly glare on Roy's face and the small, crestfallen frown on Riza's, left Maes with a rush of upset.

"The Führer mentioned me by name? How flattering."

Speak of the devil, the Captain thought darkly.

Kimblee ghosted the edge of the group, insinuating himself expertly into their ranks. "I get to crush Ishvalan scum and spend some quality time with Cadet Hawkeye. I know we soldiers are here on official assignment, but this feels positively indulgent."

Kimblee stood beside Riza, and poor girl's nostrils flared. Even mild-mannered Charlie scowled.

"I can't sign off on a mission this dangerous," said Maes, wanting nothing more than to scrunch Grace's cable into a ball and give it to Roy for target practice. "Nothing about any of this was run by me first!"

The Crimson Alchemist regarded Hughes with something akin to pity; it made Maes's blood boil. "Not to belabor a point, but last I checked, the orders of the Führer superseded those of a mere captain."

Grace glared at Kimblee, eyes narrowing. "Watch your tongue, Major, when addressing a superior officer," cautioned the older woman.

Yeah, thanks Kaolin, thought Hughes miserably. Bunch of help you are now.

"I didn't even write a report!" he said aloud. "They would have no way of knowing the scope of the problem in Daliha!"

Maes didn't even have to insinuate anything for Roy Mustang to shoot a very dark, very dangerous look in Kimblee's direction. The Major merely bobbed his shoulders in a shrug. "Perhaps the higher-ups grew tired of your bandying the decision back and forth, Captain."

Maes didn't have to justify himself to the likes of Kimblee, but before he could stop himself, he protested: "I was trying to make the right decision!"

Kimblee paced around them with his hands in his pockets. "If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. But the universe has no fixed agenda, Captain, least of all in times of conflict. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong… only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

"Consider Miss Hawkeye," he said suddenly, making Maes jump and Roy's hackles stand on end. Riza's honey-colored eyes tracked the alchemist as he circled behind her. "She has already made the decision, being the dutiful soldier she is, to follow the order. Every significant vital sign in her body –– temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on –– was altered from the moment she made up her mind. Decisions are merely signals telling her body and mind to move in a certain direction. They are not moral imperatives."

"Maybe not to you," snarled Roy; he had taken to sitting on his hands to keep his temper in check. Maes remembered what had happened several weeks earlier, the last time the alchemists had butted heads, and Kimblee tried to come between Roy and Riza –– the Flame Alchemist had nearly torn Kimblee's collar in two.

Crimson snorted. "If you think this military is somehow concerned with the morality of their strategic decision making, Mustang, then you're either stupid or delusional… and I do not believe you are stupid."

"We may not always like them," growled Maes, stepping up to Kimblee –– Hughes was several inches taller, but for all the confidence it gave him, he may as well as well have been talking to Basque Grand, "they might even be unjust… but I won't abide any of this behind-closed-doors espionage bullcrap!"

"And yet you're still obliged to acquiesce to those same people and institutions you think unjust, Captain. The tendency shows you for the hypocrite you are."

Maes bristled, but said nothing.

Kimblee went on: "You live attached in a cowardly fashion to conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all defendable foundation. You want too much, Captain... you covet an honor that does not exist in the real world. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideals and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your duty which makes you sad, troubled, and unbalanced."

"I can tell you who's unbalanced," muttered Charlie at Riza's side. She shot him a sharp look from under her fringe.

The Major continued to pace like an agitated panther. Sans uniform jacket and camouflage coat, he looked all the world as though he was working on his suntan. He mused to no one in particular: "In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of individuality and all feeling of self governance, because at every moment our estimable leaders suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the mortal wound of your so-called civilized ideal, Captain."

His circuit had brought him back to Cadet Hawkeye. He dropped a hand on her shoulder and she regarded it as one would a desert spider. Roy fixated on Kimblee, the black of his eyes flat and angry.

Crimson addressed Riza politely: "Shall we start tomorrow then, Cadet?"

Riza managed a stiff nod… anything, Maes supposed, to get him well clear of her personal space. Pretending to doff a hat, Kimblee strode away. It would have been comical, if the man wasn't so damn terrifying.

Riza stood there a little while longer, then Maes, emotionally and physically exhausted, motioned for her to go. "You're dismissed, Cadet," he said wearily, wanting nothing more than to fall flat on his pallet and sleep the day away. "Get some rest.

"You're gonna need it."


	5. Circle V: Wrath and Sadness

"Wedged in the slime, they say: 'We had been sullen  
in the sweet air that's gladdened by the sun;  
we bore the mist of sluggishness in us:  
now we are bitter in the blackened mud.'  
This hymn they have to gurgle in their gullets,  
because they cannot speak it in full words." ( _Inf_. VII, 121-126)

* * *

Circle V  
 _Wrath and Sadness_

* * *

Roy found him later that evening.

The solitary figure sat amidst the crenellations ringing the circumference of the camp. His booted feet dangled over a small ravine, gurgling with muddy water. In the feeble shadow of emaciated mulberries, the stream had managed to cling to life in the desert heat. During the day, Roy remembered, men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully, readying supplies for the alchemists to purify. In the light of the sunset, the small stream looked like a ribbon of lava.

The western sky was as red as coals in a forge, lighting up the white siltstone flats along the stream, the camp, and the ruins of Daliha beyond. Dew in the twilight had wet the needles of the chaparral and rosebush, and when the rim of the setting sun edged over the horizon, the ugly plants seemed to Roy to be spotted with diamonds.

The skies of Ishval were the only perceptible changes in the arid, blasted desert. In the movement of the sun, Roy felt something he knew not how to name: some huge, cosmic sense of recurrence, of dying and returning, that frightened him and awed him in equal measures.

Roy supposed it was one of the reasons why the solitary figure liked the desert so much –– its relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.

The other reason was because the desert allowed him to kill people.

He didn't look up at the Flame Alchemist's approach, though Roy made no effort to mask his presence. The figure's only movement was to pop something in his mouth –– the remnants of a ration pack, perhaps, or a gelatin capsule. Roy was tempted to suspect the latter, for, aside from the occasional cup of lukewarm coffee, the figure didn't seem to _eat_ anything. It was as though his murderous tendencies satiated appetites of both the figurative and quite literal varieties. The consequence being that, even during downtimes in the mess, he kept himself to himself. The habit irritated Roy.

Solf J. Kimblee was one of those men one would do well to keep an eye on.

"You didn't seem very surprised by Bradley's new orders, did you?"

The Crimson Alchemist didn't look up from the transmutation circles he had been inscribing in the sand. When he drew closer, Roy recognized certain symbols –– radiochemical operators, Lorentz transformations. Provided one factored in latent alchemical energy, the equations described the transmutation of stable atoms into their radioactive counterparts.

"Good evening to you as well, Flame," murmured Kimblee. Adding a few finishing touches to his sums, he dusted his hand on the seat of his trousers and flashed Roy a small, genial smile rather than his customary leer.

The expression gave Roy pause. A snarling, scheming, show-boating Kimblee he could manage... a trifling, teasing one was another creature entirely. The tall, pale State Alchemist fancied himself the perfect balance of risk and charm, at once fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated empirical objectivity, and yet with such a strength of self-possession that he was both dismaying and intriguing in a horribly dangerous way.

Roy found in that moment that he didn't know Kimblee's intentions, couldn't anticipate his actions. Murder was easy to understand. Charm was far more complicated.

"You didn't answer my question," snapped the Flame Alchemist, retreating to the safety of his initial inquiry.

"As soldiers," Kimblee relayed dutifully, pushing himself up from his perch and stuffing his hands in his trouser pockets, "we are expected to react to dynamic situations with a certain level of flexibility. It's not our place to question an order, Mustang, merely to obey, like the good little dogs of the military we are."

"As soldiers," growled Roy, "we are also expected to respect our commanding officer's right to discretion, and to _never_ bet the safety and security of the battalion on our own self-motivation."

Kimblee quirked an eyebrow. "Do you mean to insinuate something? Out with it, Mustang. You've never been one to dance around a direct point. Tell me what's really going on in that pretty head of yours."

Roy steeled himself with some effort. "Captain Hughes never made that report to Central Command. Someone did."

Half-obscured by the shadows, Kimblee's rawboned face looked almost skeletal. He smirked, a small pouting of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes, a tilting of the head. "Do you mean to accuse me of sedition?"

"Yes."

"You believe I would go behind my commanding officer's back with the express intent of getting assigned to this counteroffensive team, the target being an Ishvalan assassin who has killed nine men in as many days, with the threat of disavowal, disgrace, or even death hanging over our heads should we fail?"

Were it any other man, it would have sounded ridiculous. But Roy knew Kimblee. He said, again: "Yes."

"How harebrained. People are liable to think I'm of an unsound mind, Flame."

Roy did not dignify that with a response.

Kimblee went on: "Well, being as you've clearly poured all your mental faculties into this little problem, do you care to guess why I'd ever entertain such a dangerous scheme?"

"You tell me. You're always looking for ways to stroke your ego, Kimblee."

The older man barked a laugh. "That's rather rich, coming from you. Perhaps, Mustang, you're simply having some difficulty accepting the fact that my skills as an alchemist are superior to yours, and thus better suited to this mission. After all, atomic fission is a cut above grade-level redox stoichiometry, wouldn't you agree?"

Roy snarled, "This has nothing to do with me!"

"Doesn't everything?"

"You glory in chaos and destruction, Kimblee. I won't have you dragging the Cadet down that path, too." He lowered his voice, stepping up to the Alchemist, stopping just short of jabbing a finger into Kimblee's sternum. "You called in favors with the top brass in Central to get this assignment, and made sure Hawkeye was the sniper tasked with accompanying you."

"Hawkeye..." for a moment, his eyes were downcast, fixated on something next to Roy's right shoe. Then Kimblee tilted his head upwards, his face one of barely concealed glee, a terrifying sort of triumph flashing in those purple-blue eyes even as his mouth twitched upwards on the left, dimpling his cheek. "It's certainly an interesting proposition, Flame. Granted, I do have a vested interest in the young lady."

Roy felt something in his stomach snarl. " _Why_ ," he demanded in a hoarse, throaty whisper.

"Because she violates the principle of equivalent exchange. It ought to be obvious to alchemists of our caliber, no? Or perhaps your preoccupations with Miss Hawkeye are less alchemical in nature and more... shall we say, mammalian?"

Roy's hands knuckled at his sides... it was the only thing that kept him from going for Kimblee's collar.

"Motivation and execution are transitive properties of any action," he continued, ignoring the fury peeling from Roy like a bad smell, "not unlike understanding, deconstruction, and reconstruction. To pick a midpoint between two sides, as she does, does not constitute balance. It is a false equivalence. Riza Hawkeye lacks any manner of will or motivation in her work but has proven herself an exceptional marksman... prodigious, even. It is art without the brush, music without the instrument. I am bound to conclude, therefore, that there is a part of this particular puzzle I am missing. I suppose, at her most basic, she presents an interesting case study. I want to know what keeps her here... what keeps her fighting."

"Then you admit you manipulated the chain of command."

"I admit nothing... though I intend to make the most of an unusual turn of events."

"She's not some laboratory specimen for you to dissect!"

"You might say that, Flame, and to a certain extent, I might agree with you. That being said, I must confess, ever since my youth, my reaction to the forbidden has been a rather stubborn urge to take it for myself." Kimblee inclined his head, until his words feathered over the shell of Roy's ear. He whispered: "I've long believed that sacrosanctity, rather than dissuade, makes something uncontrollably and deeply desirable."

Roy knew he was allowing himself to be goaded, but he didn't care. He grabbed the front of Kimblee's uniform. Mustang was shorter, but Kimblee was thin and willowy, and Roy had no trouble pushing the man against the crenellations.

"You're predictable to the point of boring," lilted Kimblee, voice small from the pressure around his throat. "You see, I know _you_ quite well, Mustang... but I'm positively titillated by the opportunity to get to know _her_."

"Shut up!" snarled Roy.

"We don't like to admit it, Flame, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people –– you no less than I –– have made possible that civilization through the willful repression of the old, animal self." Kimblee hummed; Roy felt the man's larynx vibrate against his palm. "I wonder what it would take to release the beast in you..."

"You lay one hand on her, Kimblee" Roy seethed. "You lay so much as a goddamn _finger_ on her, and you'll fucking find out."

"Mmm, I have no doubt. As enticing as the prospect is, however..." Kimblee brushed Roy's fists off his lapels as though the grip was little stronger than a toddler's. He straightened his jacket as Roy simmered. "Regardless of whatever personal disinclinations you may harbor, I am the most skilled alchemist. Riza Hawkeye is the most skilled marksman. We will hunt down this Ishvalan scumstain, and we will manage perfectly well without you."

Roy had never felt more helpless. To be forced to grin and bear Kimblee's arrogance, his flaunting of the position fortune and favor had granted him, was enough to drive the Flame Alchemist near mad with anger and frustration.

Kimblee barred his teeth in something too predatory to be called a smile. "Ah… some people just can't grasp how powerless they are. But not you, Roy Mustang. I think that's why I like you so much. I enjoy the spirited ones. I enjoy the _cognizant_ ones. Most of the time you creatures throw yourselves into submission — weak-minded and feeble. Breaking the broken is no fun at all."

Roy pursed his lips in a tight line. He fought to keep his temper under control, tried to consider the situation rationally, parse through the philosophizing to find what Kimblee was really after. The man's silver tongue was renowned; he decorated his words with eloquence and poise, even if the words themselves were poison. Evidently, they had been enough to envenom the minds of the stuffed shirts in Central, but being in Ishval had allowed Roy to build a certain tolerance to the charms of a clever turn of phrase, a pleasant lie, a thinly-veiled threat. Kimblee may have been able to worm his way into the Führer's favor, but the dogs of the military had tougher skins.

Roy took a deep breath, felt the dry desert air suffuse his bloodstream. The motion calmed him. Oxygen was as much a part of his alchemy as his biological chemistry; it allowed Roy to produce his flame, to control the relative quantities of fuel in his transmutations. To temper his power, and, he admitted, to maintain some bearing on his already beleaguered humanity, he had never manipulated flames on scales larger or distances longer than the next Ishvalan compound slated for destruction. But being the Flame Alchemist –– and the _only_ Flame Alchemist, for reasons he tried not to think about at great length –– came with a certain lack of ignorance.

His cognizance, as Kimblee had called it, manifested in the knowledge that _she_ wasn't coveted on account of the shallowness of appearance or the superficiality of status, that _she_ was coveted for being uncommon and for possessing an indomitable strength, a wisdom unforgivingly and forcefully magnificent.

And possessing, if nothing else, something very, _very_ rare...

The Flame Alchemist closed his eyes, remembering...

 _"Can I trust you, Roy... with my father's research?"_

He knew, then, that Riza Hawkeye had something the Crimson Alchemist desperately wanted.

"Hey, Kimblee."

The other man looked up from his doodles in the sand. "Hmm?"

"If anything happens to her, I guarantee something is going to happen to you." Roy surprised himself by sounding very stoic. "Except slower."

But Kimblee doesn't even have to harm her, Roy thought miserably; if he managed to lure her with his honeyed words, touch her, lift her shirt…

Roy didn't want to think about that.

"That depends entirely on our Ishvalan friend." Kimblee was still feigning detachment. It made Roy want to grind his teeth into dust. "But I'm sure the Cadet and I will do our utmost to ensure each other's safety."

"I'll hold you to that. We can't afford to lose Cadet Hawkeye. She's the best marksman we have."

Kimblee was straight faced. "I'm sure that's the only reason for your commendable concern."

Roy, muscles as taut as piano wire, turned to go, marching stiffly across the sand. As he made his way back towards Daliha, he found himself wishing the Crimson Alchemist would wear gloves. Roy knew Kimblee had reseated himself, resting his hands with his palms up, and the Flame Alchemist thought he felt the stare of the two transmutation circles burning holes into his back as he disappeared into the night.

* * *

 **Elsewhere**

Riza Hawkeye sat alone in a small tent bivouacked near the old monastery, the canvas sides breathing as the wind howled across the desert. Her two bunkmates were dead and, until command shipped more cadets of her particular sex to the front lines, Riza had the tiny tent to herself.

She didn't sleep much; nightmares and nerves saw to that. At least, she reflected, cleaning her weapon allowed her some small moment of respite. Maintenance was a welcome distraction: the protective coating of her magazine parts had formed a thick, sticky film over the course of her deployment. The rust preventives provided by the military had limited lubricating properties and, Riza believed, could actually add resistance to moving parts like the trigger and action components. Anything gummy tended to trap airborne debris –– a problem even more pronounced in a grainy, wind-swept world like Ishval.

Sitting cross-legged on the taupaulin of her tent, Riza removed the barreled action from the stock and stripped the factory rust preventatives from the metal surfaces before treating them with a corrosion-inhibiting oil. The procedure of it soothed her.

As she scrubbed, Riza allowed her head to fall back, her tuft of blonde hair scratchy on the back of her neck. She stared at the canvas ceiling, through it, imagining she could see the sky. The quiet of the starry night brought to her mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in the solitude of the desert — each convinced that their fears and wants were unique to themselves.

For a moment, Riza longed to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives were meshed with the turning of the world.

She felt so terribly alone.

Riza looked at the scope in her hand and debated whether or not to throw it across the tent in a sudden burst of helpless anger.

There was a knot in her throat. In the past few weeks, ever since she'd spotted her father's former student –– _superior officer, State Alchemist_ –– through the crosshairs of her rifle, she'd started experiencing moments of desperate emptiness, as though nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there would never be anything new. Riza regarded her life as one would a very narrow, very straight tunnel, with that damnable war always stretching before her into the infinite distance –– one long, hot day after the next, in which every hour was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time beyond the tunnel marched on, and all that seemed to happened to Riza was her getting older and smaller and sadder, as though she would wake up one morning no bigger than the dot on her laser aim, and then, sometime thereafter, she would simply disappear. Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun.

Riza had never such experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time, looking after her father, sweeping up the broken pieces of their lives he'd left behind. For as long as she could remember, she'd been striving and _striving_ to become some entity separate from her father's research –– some woman beyond the mad scrawls of Berthold Hawkeye. But rather than allow her to carve out an identity for herself, Ishval had only rendered the sins of her father, _her_ sins, in sharp relief. With every razed village, every charred corpse, every wafer of ash… and with every unspoken apology in those listless black eyes, Riza Hawkeye felt a whole new weight of nothing inside her chest, an emptiness like hunger, as though whatever had once made her feel and hurt and laugh and love had been surgically removed. Sliced out under Knox's scalpel.

How careless she had been. How naive. She could repent of her sin and decry her decision to curse Roy Mustang with Flame Alchemy until her throat turned raw and silence dusted away the words, but the wages of her foolishness would be the eternal recalling of it.

Some mistakes, she knew, would brand her forever.

Riza fixed the scope to her gun. She pulled the bolt handle. The rifle felt suddenly very heavy in her hands.

She looked around the sandy tarpaulin. It was covered in empty ration packs and water skins. Her military blues rested in a neat pile near her cot. After some searching, she swore. She had left her oil cloth with the replacement watchman, who was currently on the other side of the encampment.

Riza removed her shirt and used it to polish the solid wooden stock. The cool night air felt good on her bare skin.

Unfortunately, the Daliha camp, being a major medical station as well as the base of the State Alchemists, meant space and privacy was often at a premium. It wasn't long before Riza heard movement outside her tent, the rustle of fabric as the flap was pulled open. She looked down at herself, naked from the waist up. Her back was facing the entrance… her father's secrets in plain view of anyone who cared to look…

"Cadet, I have to speak with –– oh." A very long, very pregnant pause followed during which Riza learned how to breathe again. "I should have knocked. My apologies."

Riza sighed. She didn't have to hide anything from Roy Mustang. She did, however, have to put her shirt back on in the presence of a superior officer. Thus dressed, she turned to face him.

His face looked gaunt; he was missing his white coat, and his uniform shirt was unbuttoned at the top. He ran a hand through his head of messy black hair before he slumped against a tent pole.

"Sir... I––"

"Could we not do this?" he asked, almost breathless. "The... honorifics..."

"It's protocol, Major. Moreover, it's proper."

"Proper..." he breathed the word, pushing a breath out roughly through his nose. It was almost a snort.

"What do you want, sir?" asked Riza quietly, but firmly, aware of some present uncertainty she could neither know nor name.

"A moment of peace and quiet," Roy told her, rubbing his temples as though to dispel a headache. Riza wondered, off-handedly, if he was drinking enough water.

"From what?"

He massaged the space adjacent to his ears, making the corners of his eyes go up and down, out and in. He sighed, gesturing vaguely to the tent flap and the camp beyond. "From this mess."

Riza, inferring Mister –– _Major ––_ Mustanghad no immediate intention of leaving, sat down on her pallet. She had rarely seen him so candid in recent weeks. She didn't yet know what to make of it. "Can you be more specific, sir?"

"I don't know," he admitted, dropping his hands from his temples to lean his head against the canvas. "But I'm tired and lonely, and you're the only person I can talk to without putting myself at risk."

"And what of putting _me_ at risk, sir?" she asked coldly, suddenly aware that her father's former student, _her superior officer_ , was still dressed in full uniform while she was in little more than her undershirt and loose cotton trousers. In her tent. In the middle of the night.

Roy looked at her strangely, his head tilted at an angle, almost a caricature of puzzlement, before his dark eyes widened and he set his mouth in a bloodless line. Riza had never considered him a naive soul, but Roy Mustang could be damnably careless at times. The other officers would never cross a State Alchemist in discipline, but Riza's meagre station as a sniper held no such protections. Though regs were the last things on people's minds when Ishvalan assassins were picking off soldiers like fishes in a tepid pond, Riza knew better than to let her guard down.

Still... she would be lying to herself if she claimed she didn't relish the prospect of his company. Her mind drifted to those long, rainy nights when Roy would sneak into her room to lend his assistance with her arithmetic homework; the memory was warm in all the ways Ishval, despite its heat, was not.

Neither one of them said anything for a long while, each at an understanding that they had reached some manner of impasse. Riza could almost see the lines of choices made and choices left untouched intertwining Roy's expression in a rich mesh of pulsating orbits. She could see the lost value of his past intentions, the trials he had chosen to bear and the wisdom that lay concealed within his tragically mortal body. But she knew that if she said a word of it aloud, theirs would drift into a conversation neither one of them was ready for. Not yet. There was a certain relativity to their current situation that threw a shadow against any hints at restitution. Seeking a return to the way things used to be had become to Riza a forbidden luxury.

"I'll go..." Roy mumbled after several minutes, making to leave.

Someone who was not Officer Cadet Hawkeye bade him, "Stay."

"Hawkeye..."

"Please, sir." Riza surprised herself with her urgency –– a command made of her request, her voice as sharp as bladed steel.

Roy stayed.

"You're angry at me," he said.

Riza's whole body went cold and still. Roy squatted down beside her, and even though she took pains not to look up, not to look at him at all, Riza could feel his proximity, could smell the sweat from his skin and the hot sand in his hair and hear the ragged pattern of his breathing.

"You're angry at me," repeated Roy, and his voice hitched a little as it stumbled over the words. "You think…"

He didn't finish the thought. He didn't have to. She already knew.

His voice was the same, she realized abruptly. For years, Riza had imagined that voice lilting over forbidden musings, things left unsaid, unremembered. Those words he had managed to choke out to her before he went away. Those words he hadn't.

Roy wrung his hands as though twisting an invisible twine of rope. "After my first few weeks stationed here," he said quietly, not quite looking at her, not quite looking at the floor, "I grew certain that there were few good things left in the world. Few things to be hopeful for…

"But then I found you."

Riza kept her expression schooled. Under any other circumstance, she would have implored his departure, for the sake of their reputations and their commissions if not their very souls. But his pale face seemed struck with such an earnestness of expression it enraptured her, like an animal caught in a spotter's scope.

"I thought you were just an illusion, wishful thinking," he went on, quickly, as though afraid she would try to stop him, "I saw in you an allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. I began to feel like a man who had ridden through this desert without ever really knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then coming upon the mirage of a garden, and finding that the mirage is real, and that _it_ is bigger than the whole damn desert."

He hesitated, for a moment. Riza knew he was accustomed to her quiet but unfamiliar with her stubborn, slow-burning anger… if that even was what it was. He reached out and placed his palm against her cheek, turned her head toward his so she was forced to look at him. She could feel the skin of his palm… smooth, warm. Not unlike the walnut stock of her sniper rifle. There was an irony there, she supposed.

In his black eyes, she could see herself reflected in miniature, a cascade tunneling back to the time before he left, before she believed he was gone forever, when those eyes had welcomed her into every day and shepherded her, every night, into some small realm of comfort, an oasis amidst the comfortlessness of her old life.

"I've wasted so much time over the past twelve months considering how bad my life could get, but when I saw you ascend over that rise, my very worst fears had never felt more real... but..." he whispered. There was a mistiness in his eyes, but water in Ishval is too precious a resource to waste on the likes of tears. "You turned out even stronger than I imagined."

The hard casement inside her broke.

"Why?" was the only word that came out. Without intending to or even thinking about it, Riza allowed him to draw her against his chest, let him wrap his arms around her. She breathed into the space between his collarbones, inhaling the still-familiar scent of him.

There were so many things she needed to ask: how had it come to this? How could he let the military turn him, turn _them_ , into _this_? But all she managed to say, her voice barely more than a whisper, was: "Why didn't you come for me? After all those years — all that time — why didn't you come?"

Then she found she couldn't speak at all.

"I'm sorry." He brushed his lips against her forehead, clutched desperately at her hair. "I'm so sorry."

Riza's eyes burned; her throat felt raw and sore. She was suddenly exhausted beyond any exhaustion she had felt before — too tired to be hurt, too tired to be angry. She just wanted to sleep, and sleep.

"I never stopped thinking about you," he said quietly, turning her face to his. "I thought of you every day."

Riza knew the kiss was meant to be quick and chaste, but after the first touch of his lips something incendiary roared in her belly, a violent frission she could not quite describe. But her fingers yanked him close, digging into his back, her arms crushing him to her as though wanting nothing more than to meld them together. Riza knotted her fingers in his dark, greasy hair and bit down on his bottom lip, making him groan. Their mouths met. There was nothing sweet or gentle in it; it was filled with sorrow and desperation.

It was as cruel as life. As cruel as love.

In the longing for consummation with each other, everything seemed suspended: time, law, all forbidden things. Nothing was exhausted, nothing was wanted. It was a moment of affirmation, if for however short a time, though that moment seemed, to them, indelibly infinite...

 **To Be Continued...**


	6. Circle VI: Heresy

"We see, even as men who are farsighted,  
those things," he said, "that are remote from us;  
the Highest Lord allots us that much light.  
But when events draw near or are, our minds  
are useless; were we not informed by others,  
we should know nothing of your human state." ( _Inf._ X, 97-105)

* * *

Circle VI  
 _Heresy_

* * *

Major Kimblee was humming again.

Riza very much wanted to shoot him in the foot.

His music filled the air without effort, like waves filling holes in sand; the sound rushing in and around her amidst the crushing desolation of the ruins. Under the high, hot sun, the notes were almost tangible things. Riza imagined she could eat the air and drink the music, so heady was the fragrance of the baking sand and the melody of the hum in the Alchemist's throat.

The song, she supposed, was not altogether unpleasant. Her companion could carry a tune well, almost prodigiously so, and nothing about his quiet little diversion seemed saddled with the intention to annoy or distract. Rather, Riza hated how the sound seemed to violate the solemnity, the silence, of the ruins. As though he were humming through a funeral dirge.

It could be worse, she supposed. He could be singing out loud, lyrically, the words brutalizing the somber dignity of Daliha.

They had been scouring the district for the past several hours, moving eastward from the Amestrian camp. In their march, the stark buildings, the torn and tattered awnings, the lantern alcoves honeycombing the walls had begun to blur together. The streets, Riza imagined, had once been beautiful, the sidewalks paved with level white stone, laid end to end with such precision that the joints were almost invisible. The towers and spiraling minarets, spires with conical-shaped crowns, were nothing short of monoliths, the bastions of Daliha and Ishval's pride. Their bells had once called the god-fearing to prayer, or else had signaled the opening of the markets. There had been a time when Daliha had stamped its existence on the map of financially and economically significant places on the trade route to Xing.

It was as though no one had communicated that particular vision to the Amestrians before the war broke out, Riza thought sadly. The streets that should have been such a joy to walk were littered with rubble and debris, broken furniture and huge chunks of masonry taller than Major Armstrong. The district was like an unfinished painting. So much of the canvas was still perfectly white, as though waiting for the artist's hand to return. The afternoon light was bright enough to blind. As Riza maneuvered over the loose fragments of stone, surveyed the sublimity and strident, stubborn grandeur of the ruins, she tried to imagine a time when the walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls hosted scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, when the city resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since scorched from the face of the earth.

She could feel the ground burning through the soles of her combat boots. The butt of her sniper rifle was hot in her hands, the wood warm even beneath the heavy bindings. Riza blinked to keep the moisture out of her eyes, swiped at the sweat dripping from her nose, and wished she could take a position in one of the empty windows. She felt more comfortable in a nest, sitting above the city, where she could see everything. Walking two steps behind Major Kimblee, looking _up_ at the buildings flanking the streets rather than _over_ their rooftops, made her feel uncharacteristically claustrophobic.

They hadn't spoken a great deal, thought Riza, which, while unusual for someone of her companion's loquaciousness, was not unwelcome. The Major had moved with purpose through the winding streets. He seemed to know where he was going –– the inside skinny among the infantry was the man had photographic powers of recall. Riza supposed Kimblee had needed little more than a cursory glance at a survey map to commit their route to memory.

At certain intersections, he ordered Riza to scale walls and ramparts, marking certain rooftop cornerstones with a stick of red chalk. Riza obeyed without complaint, even when her muscles began to ache from hauling her rifle up the sides of buildings. Kimblee stayed on street level, watching her, offering the occasional instruction concerning the markers, but mostly resting with one foot propped against a wall, his arms crossed, humming absently to himself, a distant, unfocused look on his face as though his thoughts were a million miles away.

The Crimson Alchemist's apparent lack of interest surprised her. As they meandered through the abandoned city, Major Kimblee kept his hands –– and his transmutation arrays –– tucked away in his trouser pockets. He seemed almost at ease, enjoying the stroll under the blue sky. It fell to Riza to play sentry, and to wonder just what was going on inside his head. To puzzle out the reason why, on such a dangerous mission, his attentions were directed elsewhere.

She spent the day waiting for Major Kimblee to direct her graffiti, dutifully climbing and marking the designated tower or tall building with her chalk, before moving on to the neighboring block. And so their survey went, progressing continuously eastward, until, quite without Hawkeye's noticing, the afternoon began to fade into evening.

Dusk fell so slowly that Riza failed to make note of it until, steadily, the path ahead of her disappeared into darkness. It took a stumble to rouse her from her carousel of concerns and take stock the sudden lack of light around her.

But her humming superior officer seemed unmindful of the change. Riza trudged along at a sedate pace behind him, her mind focused on his footfalls as they seemed to echo along the desolate street.

Major Kimblee had an odd gait, she noted. It was slightly lurching as he went, as though he was leaning too far forwards. It was difficult to tell, standing a small ways behind him. In any case, the motion had the effect of making him look like a vulture picking at carrion.

He turned, suddenly, breaking Riza from her thoughts, and began to squeeze through a narrow gap between two buildings. Riza followed, shuffling backwards, having drawn a small handgun and pointing it towards the street, covering the Major's six.

They emerged in a small square, three sides framed by broken and battered market stalls –– the rotten meat and fruit obscured by clouds of botflies, fat from gorging themselves on the refuse –– the fourth by an Ishvalan _Sadagh_ , a temple, built directly into the side of the cliff. Major Kimblee paused before the entrance, and Riza peered over his shoulder, looking through the open doorway. The temple was long abandoned. A diffuse bluish light beamed through the pillared alley, a sharp contrast with the crimson gloam of the setting sun upon the building's exterior. The fragrance of incense was still heavy and, at some distance, the sound of chimes could be heard, the desert wind catching a few pale tubes of teak.

Everything seemed to Riza so real, so material, so substantial and yet so impenetrable. The atmosphere was dense and heavy and she had to fight the urge to move on and escape the sacred building, feeling a bit foiled by not having completely deciphered the holiness of the place.

But Major Kimblee seemed to have no interest in shifting. He raised his hand against the glare of the setting sun, stared at the brutally spartan transmutation circle that radiated outward from the center of his palm, the latent energy making his fingers twitch slightly. He stared long and hard at the abandoned temple. The stones, in some way, seemed to speak to Major Kimblee, and he in turn seemed to know their mute language. Riza grew increasingly unsettled as she watched him think deep, dangerous thoughts she was not privy to. She frowned deeply, a twisting in her facial flesh she could not control.

Though Riza did not yet understand him, she could pinpoint something of the Alchemist's curious fascination with the very same country he took such delight in destroying. It seemed to Riza that the more advanced, and the more powerful, a society, or a person, imagined itself to be, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for a man is wont to see in them a redemptive, sobering reminder of the fragility of his own hubris. Ruins, she supposed, pose a direct challenge to petty concerns with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They punctured the inflated importance of the pursuit of worldly miscellanea. If Major Kimblee placed any stock in the efficacy of his own wisdom –– which Riza didn't doubt for an instant –– then his own philosophy necessitated a sombre respect for the land he himself had laid waste to. It was a complicated arrangement in her mind, but wherever Solf J. Kimblee was concerned, Riza had consigned herself to being denied most semblances of comprehension.

Abruptly, the man stopped whistling.

"Here," decided Kimblee.

"Yes, sir." Riza looked around. "The streets converge on the _Sadagh_. It will be an easily defendable position, Major."

"I agree. You may set yourself up on the rooftop, Cadet."

"Sir."

Together, Soldier trailing State Alchemist, they ascended the narrow spiral staircase in the vestry.

On the temple's flat roof, the warmth of the tile seeped through the heavy wool of her uniform trousers as Riza crouched to holster her pistol and unwrap her rifle. She perched near the edge of the roof; in the evening light, the buildings spread in every direction like great red serpents with rectangular scales. Only the minarets ruined the illusion, but in the twilight they were just as enflamed as everything else –– the siltstone, the streets, the hot, unfriendly sky with its violent taches of purple and red. From her nest, Riza could see what a maze Daliha was, every house three stories and each joined to the next. The streets curved as if laid down on a whim, twisting without pattern or design.

Somewhere behind her, Major Kimblee lounged against the juncture of the temple's architecture and the cliff face, out of Riza's line of sight.

Hawkeye flattened herself on the warm stone, her rifle pointed towards the square. She heard the man behind her bark a laugh.

"Our Ishvalan assassin only comes out at night, Cadet," said Major Kimblee, slightly amused. "While I admire your diligence, there's no need to stay in such an uncomfortable position until full nightfall."

Riza didn't look from the scope of her gun. "With all due respect, sir, we would do well to maintain our vigilance. And this is the most comfortable position I've been in all day."

"As you wish, Miss Marksman."

"Please don't call me that, Major."

"My apologies. It won't happen again."

"Thank you, sir."

Riza resumed her watch. From the rooftop, she could see her chalk markings scattered throughout the district, forming concentric circles converging at the temple square. When night fell, the Major would alchemize a set of controlled explosions at the designated positions, forcing any unfriendlies quartered in Daliha towards the open space, where Riza had a clear shot. Were it a group of military grunts or any other state alchemist setting the fires to smoke the assassin out, Riza wouldn't have worried. But Kimblee wasn't renowned for being disciplined. She wasn't even sure he could –– or _wanted_ –– to control his combustive alchemical reactions. He seemed to glory in bloodshed.

Kimblee started humming again, and bloodshed was suddenly on the forefront of Riza's thoughts.

Her shoulders must have tautened, because she sensed the Crimson Alchemist shifting on his perch.

"Recognize the tune, Cadet?"

"I can't say I do, sir." She could feel him standing behind her; his attention made her skin itch. His eyes seemed to drill holes into the space between her shoulder blades. "I haven't listened to music in a very long time."

"That really is a shame. 'There is geometry in the humming of the strings," he quoted, "'There is music in the spacing of the spheres.' I like music, Miss Hawkeye. It's disciplined. It's purposive. It's beautiful."

Riza had heard rumors about Major Kimblee... that the Alchemist liked to coordinate his explosions to pieces he composed inside his head. A destructive symphony of his own fashioning.

As though tracing her train of thought, Kimblee went on: "Listening to music while one stretches one's body close to its limit, to dance along the edge of utter ruin, is to attain a sort of calm. Work that puts your soul at risk… we become simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency is what I seek most of all. In this regard, music gives me deep solace."

Whenever two human beings spend time together, sooner or later they invariably begin to irritate one another. Riza suspected she was fast approaching her breaking point.

"Would you stand for a moment, Cadet?"

Riza lowered her rifle a fraction of a degree. She fought to keep the impatience out of her voice. "Sir? Is there something the matter with my current position?"

The question elicited a snort. "Something to that effect."

Riza pulled her rifle to her shoulder, stood, and turned to face the Alchemist. To her surprise, he had abandoned his stoop near the cliff face and stood less than four feet away from her. And, bridging the space between them, was his outstretched hand –– long fingers, a wrist peaking out from a sleeve, corded and pale. And on the palm, a moon sigil inscribed in an equilateral triangle.

Riza glanced from the proffered hand, to the Alchemist's face, then back to the hand. She was aware of how comical she probably looked, and she didn't doubt Major Kimblee would have laughed if she wasn't so earnest in her bemusement.

It was growing dark, and suddenly, like an act of providence, the desert moon lifted a forehead above the horizon, just over Major Kimblee's filigreed palm.

Behind them, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal, the white streets turning to flame as the twilight extinguished itself in its long westward slide.

Major Kimblee began to hum again. He had not yet retracted his hand.

Riza found she had a sudden urge to unholster one of her pistols and shoot right through his palm, a bullet hole down the middle of the transmutation circle.

"Dance with me, Miss Hawkeye."

Riza glared daggers at him. "We're on a rooftop, sir," she began, not wholly angered, not wholly incredulous, "in the middle of a war zone. And you want to dance?"

"I can think of no better stage."

"It's... it's..."

"Yes?"

"Ridiculous. Respectfully, Major, it's insane."

"By whose standards, Cadet? I see no evidence to attest to your perspective's eminence over mine. Besides..." his narrow shoulders bobbed in a shrug, "I wish to share the music."

"No _evidence_... sir, we're hunting an Ishvalan sniper. And you're... you are––"

"I am what?" he asked, his eyes teasing. "Are you referring to the work I've done here in Ishval in accordance with my duty as a State Alchemist?"

She did dignify the rhetorical question with any meaningful response, but the moonlit ruins, the gutted city, glinted in her peripheries, which seemed to answer him for her.

"The foremost reason for committing what you would deem loathsome and detestable acts –– and I suppose you're right in that I'm regarded as something of an expert in that respect –– is purely for personal satisfaction. Promotion, prestige, power, monetary gain, honor and glory are all very well and good, but it dilutes that piquancy of true indulgence to a baser level than is obtainable by anyone with a truly refined taste for destruction. An objectivity towards such things is as rare as a perfect symphony..."

"This isn't the time––"

"You've got your causalities confused, Miss Hawkeye," he insisted, a hard glint in his eyes that made Riza's heart beat arrhythmically. "Evidence should steer you to a theory; you cannot allow the theory itself to guide the evidence upon which you focus."

His right hand was cold when it clasped her left. The other found the small of her back, and she had to keep herself from flinching away from it, his palm a mere few layers of fabric away from what lay beneath...

"And what theory do you imagine I've formulated, sir?" asked Hawkeye, her throat suddenly dry.

He turned elegantly, his body in tune with whatever slow music was playing inside his head, pulling her along with him. He kept his eyes on her, yet still, even without looking at his feet, he seemed to know exactly where to take her. Every moment, every movement, every angle seemed planned in advanced. Nothing felt forced; Riza thought she would begin to float, up and above the buildings, as if her body held no substance.

"You believe there is something very much the matter with this world, with this war, Miss Hawkeye" he said quietly, tapping lightly on her knuckles to keep his rhythm. "With me... with you. That our shared insanity lays in our _willingness_ to experience with excruciating intensity the consequences of our sins. There is no evidence that we've been placed on this earth to be moral creatures. And in fact our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather... _interesting_ things."

"Like this?"

"Very much like this."

The Major delivered his little speech with such solemnity, such a grave sense of purpose and commitment, Riza felt herself moved quite against her better judgement. What sort of soldier was he, she wondered, who expounded to his captive audience on the metaphysics of morality, the philosophy of insanity, amidst the ruins of the very city he had destroyed, who saw himself as serving an essential role in the dark reckonings of humanity? There was something almost comical about it, she supposed, but it didn't occur to Riza to laugh, or even give her attention to something else. She could only listen and, to her horror… _agree_.

Riza spun on and on as though if she gave herself to the dizzying motion of the movements all she might dance the fear –– of him, of _herself_ –– out of her. As if by turning and tilting long enough, hard enough, she might forget.

Insanity, insanity, insanity, she repeated the word like a chant, and with the mantra, the memory.

Of the night before.

Of him.

 _Roy..._

 _What have I done..._

Her chest tightened. The hand on her back splayed itself across her spine.

"Don't try to correct your steps — just breathe. Another long, slow one… another. Good girl."

As Riza gradually recovered her breath, the sudden lurch of panic began to fade. He was right… it was easier if she didn't struggle. The sound of her fitful gasping was underlaid by the dangerous softness of his voice.

"That's better," he murmured. "That's the way of it."

His hand continued to rove in slow, easy rotations over her back. There was nothing… illicit, in his touch — in fact, she might have been a child he was trying to soothe. He began to hum again... Riza could almost feel the sound vibrating through her chest.

"Do you recognize the tune now, Miss Hawkeye?"

She sighed in resignation, beginning to feel a bit dizzy, her stomach twisting in a way that made her wish it was from hunger. "No, sir."

"Well," he mused, "I can't imagine very many Amestrians would recognize a hymn to Ishvalla if they heard one."

The dance came to an abrupt halt. Riza stared at those storm-blue eyes, not quite the color of Ishval's sky when it let the sun rise and scatter its light. They looked so glaciated, like his stare was slowly freezing the space between their noses. He was suddenly holding her hand and her back none too gently.

"When the 27th moved through the Gunja District under Brigadier General Fessler," he elaborated with slow, molten leisure, "I was tasked by our esteemed leaders to destroy an Ishvalan seminary. The site was a front for underground weapons smuggling, funneling munitions and supplies to warrior monks on the front lines. I was more than happy to see it reduced to rubble.

"However, our intel turned out to be less than accurate. The seminary was completely empty upon our arrival. Ransacked, down to the last relic. Stripped bare. Only one person remained, a young woman. She prostrated herself before her idol, on her knees in the sand. She was wounded. She was starving. She was completely, utterly alone. But she showed no fear. She continued her prayers with little consideration of my presence.

"I asked her to sing me a song," Major Kimblee told Riza in a soft dulcet, as though disclosing a deep, dark, secret. "In return, I promised to spare her life. She sang me a canticle, part of a rich hymn praising Ishvala. The hymn is usually sung in unison by a monastic choir, but she managed well enough on her own. More than managed. She sang so purely. She had such a beautiful voice, Miss Hawkeye. Perfect pitch… the words floated like butterflies in the sunlight. The music was the pulse and the breath and the lifeblood of the world… I have never forgotten that song. It's like a lullaby for my soul."

Riza Hawkeye suddenly hated Kimblee, as much as Roy hated him, as much as it was possible to hate another human being.

"Did you do as you promised, sir?" she asked quietly, the words dripping poison.

Without a speed and dexterity she didn't anticipate, Kimblee snatched both of her wrists, holding them between their bodies without hurting her but with enough force to tell her he was more than capable of doing so. Riza felt her pulse flutter and her stomach lurch, as though she'd passed over a rise in a hill, leaving her breathless. The fear was almost suffocating.

A few long fingers ran over her calluses and Riza pulled away on instinct, flinching from him. The grip tightened.

"I alchemized her blood into thermite, an iron-based explosive. The exothermic reaction destroyed the seminary completely."

"Why..."

"We are soldiers, Riza Hawkeye," said Kimblee quietly, by her ear. "This is what we do. This is who we are."

Riza twisted her wrists free, and before she could think to go for her sidearm and wave it in his direction, the Crimson Alchemist retreated from her, taking a few light steps towards the cliff face, a placid expression on his face.

"You still smell like him, you know," said Kimblee suddenly, making Riza's stomach drop. His mouth twisted in a leer as her face paled. "Like cooked corpses. Like fire. You've carried him around all afternoon."

Riza tried to fix the ice inside her chest, but it was all at once embarrassment and shame and a deep, nauseating fear; unable to isolate the emotion, it stayed unknown and unnamed. She found her hand going to where her rifle rested against an exposed rebar, clutching it like the mast of a tempest-tossed schooner.

"How parochial," said Major Kimblee, a little sniffily, trying to pick a grain of sand out from under a fingernail. "Stringing climax on climax like beads on a necklace, in time anyone not merely fucking for sense should sicken of it. A word of caution, my dear, I wouldn't make a habit of bedding your commander on the nightly: no one knows as much pleasure on the last occasion as the first.

"Yet consider pain, Miss Hawkeye. Give me a centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. We are always in season for pain. To experience pain requires no morality, no guilt, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always."

Riza took a deep, shuddering breath. "You're a psychopath," she told him, surprising herself with a glacial calm.

"I prefer creative." At the whiskey-colored glower shot his way, Major Kimblee chuckled, seating himself on a block of rubble, crossing his arms and his legs. "Resume your watch, Cadet Hawkeye," he ordered her, mirth in the words.

"After all, there are more monsters hiding in this place besides ourselves."

 **To Be Continued...**


	7. Circle VII: Violence

"Now I would have you know: the other time  
that I descended into lower Hell,  
this mass of boulders had not yet collapsed;  
but if I reason rightly, it was just  
before the coming of the One who took  
from Dis the highest circle's splendid spoils  
that, on all sides, the steep and filthy valley  
had trembled so, I thought the universe  
felt love (by which, as some believe, the world  
has often been converted into chaos);  
and at that moment, here as well as elsewhere,  
these ancient boulders toppled, in this way." ( _Inf_. XII, 34-45)

* * *

Circle VII

 _Violence_

* * *

 _"This can't happen again."_

The desert had grown dark and foreboding. Roy Mustang was shut up in the dungeon of his thoughts, pacing its narrow cell, wearing down the stones.

 _"This was a mistake. I am so sorry for putting in this position, sir."_

That was the rub of it, thought Roy bitterly. The endless stream of apologies.

 _They had moved like ribbons in the wind, something weightless, timeless. Elegance at its finest and pain in its truest form; children of passion and admirers of agony. They floated and twisted in tandem across the sand, poised and balanced like two butterflies circling in the air. Tethers fell away, and the two of them rose gently, above the canvas and stone, over the city, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky._

As he allowed himself to remember, across the desolation, Ishval sat in supreme indifference to his misery. The forbidden intimacy of the dunes and buttes, their silent, apathetic wonder, rendered Roy to a thing of no great importance. He could regret, could forget, but the desert would shirk his efforts. It would remain long after he was gone, to cover his sadness with sand.

And he knew… there were few other griefs in the whole miserable world that held for Roy Mustang more bitterness than his love for this woman, a love that propriety forbade him from giving, and her from receiving.

It was there, within his grasp. The possibility of _them_. But even the mere facsimile of it came with such guilt he continually found himself retracting his hand.

He used to wonder, sometimes, whether he would rather have shame and remorse with Riza Hawkeye in his life than unfeeling, uncaring numbness without her.

Against all probability, he always seemed to turn up with the same answer.

Roy thought back to the afternoon he had returned to Hawkeye-Sensei's house, a mere few days before Riza had disrobed, and showed him the secrets of flame alchemy. He wondered fancifully if in some way Riza had seen more clearly than he did, had sensed the threat which his return implied –– the approaching disintegration of her being and the destruction of her idealistic beliefs. In retrospect, it seemed almost precept that the evil that came from his presence in her life far outweighed any semblances of good.

The maps he had made, the silly, childish dreams he had shared, the hope he had sown, had corrupted a person whose spirit once illuminated his life like a warm hearth on a rainy night.

 _"Please... stay with me."_

 _"You have to go, sir. I'm due to depart soon. No one can see you here."_

 _"You misunderstand me, Cadet." The taste of her rank was like ash in his mouth. "Please don't go today."_

 _"Sir... Major––"_

 _"He's up to something, Riza, and I don't know what it is. But I can't––"_

 _"It is not your decision to make."_

 _"I don't trust him."_

 _"It hasn't escaped his notice."_

Roy knew the truth of it. Solf Kimblee was… wired differently. Where others saw the Ishvalans as enemies, Kimblee saw prey. There was a contemplative glitter in his indigo eyes, tilling and turning the possibilities. Kimblee wanted to kill them, certainly, but he wanted to see how long they could last while he mutilated them, blew up their limbs, disemboweled them nice and slow. He wanted to see the light go out in their red eyes and read their innards like cast divinations. He enjoyed it. He got a kick out of it. And with that terrifyingly efficacious memory of his, he could replay the tortures over and over again in his mind ad nauseam.

It frightened Roy quite beyond any fear he had felt before.

 _"Please…" Riza had insisted, as firmly as she could, "I think you should go, sir. This was a mistake."_

 _She had a hand over her mouth, the other clutching her shirt, her eyelids screwed so tightly they began to fidget and shudder._

 _"Riza… Riza, look at me."_

 _Each word dropped like a stone into a still lake. They could both feel the implications radiating outward, the ripples washing over them. Roy's face felt taut and tired and he knew he must have looked so grave. He felt, for a moment, like he was in the middle of solving the world's most difficult alchemical equation, his face set in a gaze of unwonted desperation. He wondered if she noticed his hands shaking._

 _A terrible guilt had gripped him then and he wondered if she found the sight as unbearable as he did. He wondered if she realized just how much he could not bear to lose her._

 _"Don't die."_

 _"Is that an order, sir?" she asked, her voice hollow._

 _"Yes."_

 _"Then I will make every attempt––"_

 _"No," said Roy, cutting her off. "No attempts. No trying. I won't allow you that ambiguity of choice. You do not die. Understood?"_

 _"Completely, sir."_

 _He almost said it. He almost... "Riza––" he began._

 _She shook her head._

 _"There is enough heartache and sorrow in this life without our adding to it, sir. This will not_ , can not, _happen again."_

They had departed at dawn. Roy Mustang hadn't seen them go.

He allowed his head to fall back, as though a tendon had been cut in his neck. Looking up, it almost seemed as though the night sky had distance, some stars close and others much farther away, their lights so well defined they had depth and dimension, more a mobile hanging above his head than a flat splash of color.

It was a cool night, with a waning moon hanging like a hunter's horn high overhead, throwing a silver sheen over everything. Riza Hawkeye's hair would be almost white.

Abruptly, Roy got to his feet. He pulled his ignition cloth gloves on over his hands and made his way carefully, quietly, towards the edge of the Amestrian encampment. Certain he had not been seen, he stood by the perimeter stakes, listening. He heard voices from the ridge, the nightwatchmen sharing a flask of rotgut gin. Riza's spotter was up there –– Roy could hear his laugh, smell his tobacco. But there didn't appear to be any sentries on the slopes, no patrols in the small declination between the billet and the rest of Daliha. Roy steeled himself and took a step.

"Hawkeye's tent is the other way."

Roy froze at the tired, tight words. A cloaked figure swept into his peripheries, glaring a green-eyed glare from behind his glasses.

"At least," Maes went on, "that's what I'd say if she wasn't miles away at this point."

"I'm not sure I like what you're implying, Hughes," said Roy, glad the night was dark enough to mask some of the simultaneous blanching of his face and reddening of his cheeks.

"Unlike you, Roy, I'm not a complete moron, so do me a favor and don't treat me like one, yeah?"

The simple statement caught him unaware. With a few words, Maes expressed an anger, a hurt, that made Roy's heart constrict.

"What do you want, Hughes?" he muttered. "Are you here to drag me back?"

The other man sighed. "You could have just told me you intended to follow them instead of trying to sneak off like a deserter."

"Would it have changed anything if I had?"

"No." Maes stared up at the sky, the stars glancing off the lenses of his glasses. "I know I can't stop you from leaving."

"Yes, well… you tried."

He grunted. Roy knew that trying and failing didn't count for much in their world.

"Roy," began Maes quietly. His friend's bright, intelligent eyes were half-lidded, sad, tired... everything Maes Hughes didn't deserve to be. "What's this really all about?"

Roy didn't answer him.

"I don't think so little of you that I'd expect you to go off for a quick tryst with a girl three years younger and however many ranks below you. There's something more going on between you two... I knew it from the moment she popped up and saved our asses during the initial siege. What's the deal?"

"Maes..."

"Old girlfriend? Childhood chum?"

"Both," muttered Roy; his saliva had the consistency of sawdust. "Neither. I don't know."

"Roy..." Hughes sounded pained.

"I can't... Maes, I can't let her get hurt. I promised... I promised I would look after..." Roy found he couldn't finish the thought.

Hughes clasped the Flame Alchemist's shoulders with both hands, forcing the shorter man to peer up. Roy could see himself reflected in the thumb-printed patina of Maes's spectacles. "Roy," he said firmly, gravely. "I care about you. And I care about her. I don't want anything to happen to either one of you. But this... this isn't finding consolation in each other. This isn't a reprieve. This is destructive. I know you hate that man, that _monster_... we all do. I know he scares you, and his being around _her_ scares you. But you can't fester in that hatred, Roy. Hating someone like this is drinking roach poison and waiting for the roach to die."

Roy laughed, a broken sound from a man who had been on the painful end of life's ironies too many times. "Extermination is what I'm good at, Hughes."

"Don't give me that self-pitying bullcrap," barked Maes, his eyes glinting. "What exactly were you intending to do tonight, huh? Confront them?"

"She's alone out there, Hughes!"

"She's also one of the most capable soldiers in our battalion! She isn't helpless!"

"Not against _him_ ," growled Roy, his teeth grinding together. "So long as she's with him, she's his plaything, his prisoner!"

"We're all prisoners here, Roy!" cried Hughes, no longer caring who in the encampment overheard them. "We've been prisoners from the moment we stepped off the goddamn transports! And whatever comfort you think you're getting from the prospect of burning that son of a bitch to a crisp is just nonsense... it will ruin you!"

"Hughes, I can't lose her!"

 _"And I can't lose you!"_

The two men stared at each other for a long time. After a while, Hughes's crumpled expression resolved itself into a wan smile, not quite reaching his eyes. He clutched Roy's shoulders almost desperately. "Certain people, Roy," he said quietly, "in their readiness to construct a world no external threat can penetrate, build these high defenses against the outside, against people. But it leaves their own world stripped bare. I don't... I _can't_ have that happening to you."

Roy opened his mouth to say something, before he heard footsteps fast approaching. "Captain! Major!"

Major Lambert Rosin stood so stiffly and with such a straight back that she gave off the impression of being a school mistress, an impression not helped by the way she wore her hair pulled back severely into a tight and twisted bun. She looked between Roy and Maes expectantly.

"What do you want?" mumbled Roy.

She didn't acknowledge his scathing tone. "Excuse me, sirs," she said solemnly, "I think I may have discovered something rather grave."

Maes released Roy's shoulders. He wiped his glasses on his white coat for want of something to do. "What is it?" he prompted wearily.

Gray wasted no time: "I remembered something from the autopsy yesterday morning... Dr. Knox's dislike for Major Kimblee."

"That's hardly novel, Grace."

"No, but it had occurred to me then that the good doctor must have seen his fair share of corpses, courtesy of Major Kimblee's alchemy. It would certainly cement an animosity between the two men."

Roy's stomach summersaulted at the mentioned of corpses. He suddenly wished for Maes's bracing hand back on his shoulder.

Gray Rosin went on: "I pulled the autopsy reports from our nine dead soldiers. Every single one exhibited signs of extreme cavitation. The high-velocity bullet caused a swath of tissue trauma that radiated several inches from the point of impact. In all cases, the wound wouldn't even need to hit an artery to damage the body irreparably and cause catastrophic bleeding. The exit wounds were the size of oranges. No magazines we know of can produce that kind of damage."

Maes frowned, his brow furrowing in thought. "Which is why I suspected Auerogonian trafficking––"

"As did I," said Rosin carefully. "However, after Knox's adverse reaction to Major Kimblee, I pulled additional autopsy reports. From the Gunja engagement."

Roy felt the hammer-blows of his heart through his sternum, making his head throb. "What did you find?" he breathed, already suspecting the answer, and hoping to god he was wrong.

Gray looked as pained as she ever had. "In addition to my medical examinations, I was asked to... _alchemize_ some of the Ishvalan bodies recovered in Gunja. Every single golem I created from Kimblee's stock exhibited signs of severe cavitation.

"Their sternums were quite literally blown apart."

Roy didn't hear the rest. He thought Maes may have shouted after him, begged him to wait, he wasn't sure. The dry desert air and flying sand blinding him, he turned and ran as quickly as his long legs could carry him, bolting down the hill, quickening his pace to an all out sprint when he reached flat grown. The pounding noise of his uniform-issue boots resonated off the siltstone walls of Daliha's streets and alleyways with a clanging echo that matched his heartbeat throbbing painfully inside his chest, the thick grief and fear he felt as he ran.

"Hold on, Riza," he muttered through gritted teeth. His lungs and abdomen began to ache. "Hold on."

* * *

 **Elsewhere**

"Miss Hawkeye," he asked suddenly - inspired, perhaps incited, by her stubbornness in endeavoring to avoid his company, "do you know anything of the butterfly effect?"

The only indication she had heard him was a small rustle of her hair, not quite breaking her watch over the temple square. He could understand her reluctance to shift from her current position. She had seemed gangly, awkward, curiously coltish in her movements through the city a few hours before, as though liable to canter away at the slightest start. Laying on her stomach, with her rifle trained on the clearing, she presented a far more disciplined picture.

"It's a theory in mathematics, sir," she ventured quietly. "As the saying goes, a butterfly beating its wings in North City has the ability to alter the weather in Resembool."

Solf Kimblee mulled over her answer, like sampling a fine vintage. The aphorism was juvenile, but the theory essentially correct. There was something of her education in there, he reasoned. Some small bulbs wherein lived her secret history. Teasing them out was proving to be more difficult than he anticipated. The girl guarded herself well. The Alchemist was finding in her character hard and stubborn nodes, old resentments as flammable as resin.

"I'll confess you are not altogether unintelligent, Miss Hawkeye."

A fractional turn of her head, eyes blazing a warning, was enough to dash his attempt at flattery like a decanter thrown into a fire.

It occurred to Kimblee in that moment that for all his knowledge and intuition, he could not entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis, but what butterfly hatched out followed its own nature, the patterning of which was, as of yet, quite beyond his power to anticipate.

He wondered, idly, if the young woman kept a gun on her upper thigh. Perhaps he would ask Roy Mustang.

"Your answer is pithy, but fundamentally sound. The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. Those of a cautious constitution will sometimes warn against the manipulation of environmental factors. It's entirely possible the change you thought you were making for the better causes so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss.

"Too many variables to control the outcome."

He harbored no such anxieties himself. There was magic and music in fissile combustion superior to any other art form. An exquisite alchemy involved in mixing pieces of his self and his soul into the precisely perfect blend of harmonies, melodies, and sound. And the best symphonies of violence were like semaphores of his lived experience, with death as the final coda.

And he did not play for the sake of exhibiting his virtuosity: he played, quite simply, for the joy of it.

He had always had an ear for music, and maybe he had always had something of an eye for it as well... thinking back to his first encounter with Berthold Hawkeye and his daughter some ten years previously. But it wasn't until the breakout of this little soirée when he recognized that great beauty could be found also in great destruction, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both.

"Does any of this have a bearing on our mission here, sir?" she queried, breaking him from his ruminations.

Kimblee tamed the chuckle in his chest. Ever since their turn about the rooftop –– and his, admittedly, rather vulgar remark about her little rendezvous with a certain Flame Alchemist –– she had attempted to shut herself off to him entirely.

"I thought you might be interested in how I intend to capture our culprit, Miss Hawkeye. You see," he balanced along the temple's edge, relishing the cool night wind as it bandied with his tail, "in traditional mechanics, alchemists are taught that small initial perturbations lead to small changes in behavior. This is the law of equal and opposite reaction, the conservation of energy, equivalent exchange. However, deterministic nonlinear systems are central to chaos theory and often exhibit fantastically complex and anarchic behavior. And this principle is, in essence, the core of my alchemy."

He monitored the creases of her combat cloak for some tell. Small mounds appeared where her shoulder blades pushed against the material.

"I understand your alchemy agitates molecules, Major, making them unstable." Did she sound a little breathy when she said the words? wondered Kimblee. He hoped so. It was delightful to see frailty and caution integrated so seamlessly with her arch wit and strength of character.

"Fission is by definition a form of transmutation, Miss Hawkeye, since the products of the reaction are not the same elements as the original atom. In my transmutations, a mass of fissile material is forced to go supercritical, facilitating a nonlinear growth of chain reactions. Chaos is not simply disorder. Chaos explores the transitions between order and disorder, which often occur in surprising ways."

"Controlled chaos," finished Miss Hawkeye, the barrel of her gun lowering a fraction of a degree. "A constrained criteria preceding an unconstrained transmutational product."

Kimblee had drifted to her side, watching her watching the square, his shin level with her shoulder. "Not dissimilar to the rapid oxidation of a material in an exothermic chemical reaction, no? Quite like flame alchemy."

She visibly flinched, just as she had when he placed his hand on her back during their dance. The crease between her shoulder blades deepened.

"Curious, is it not?" he considered bandying with a strand of her hair, like he used to do with the cloth bookmarks in his old alchemy tomes. But, deciding he was not keen on being shot, decided to keep his hands to himself. "That Ishval's two most prolific killers share an alchemical praxis founded upon deterministic nonlinear systems of physics?"

"I wouldn't know, sir," she managed stiffly, her jaw working in little ruts. "I'm not an alchemist."

"Perhaps not... but your sire, on the other hand..."

He couldn't stop a little shiver of pleasure from roving up his spine as she stood, turned, and faced him, with such indignation and _violence_ in her eyes it took his breath away.

"You have his hands, Miss Hawkeye," explained Kimblee, not unkindly, his placid smile never wavering for an instant. "I knew it from the moment I saw you sitting with Mustang and Hughes."

In a manner almost charming, she tried to mask her reaction with half-interested questions, as though she _hadn't_ just shot to her feet in a sudden fit of distress.

"You knew my father, sir?"

"In a very humble capacity. We crossed paths in my search for an alchemy master." His eyebrows quirked. "You were there."

"Was I?"

"Yes." Kimblee sounded almost wistful. "A small girl had been practically riding on Master Hawkeye's coattails. She had a mop of blond hair and large amber eyes. An unsightly floral-print dress. She didn't smile very much."

Riza gripped her sniper rifle to keep her hands from shaking… or, more likely, Kimblee thought with amusement, from punching him in the mouth. "You have a good memory, sir."

"I never forget a face."

"Yet I don't remember you."

"You have no reason to remember me, Miss Hawkeye. But I recognize your father's skill in your hands. They are capable, sure hands. The way you hold the rifle, load ammunition, adjust your sights… your every moment suggests a keenness and a care I have only ever seen in my kin. We humans are narcissistic creatures; we are quick to recognize our own traits in others. You have the hands of an alchemist."

"Respectfully, Major Kimblee," she wasn't quite growling, but it was close, "sound carries well from this spot, and if our target is in the vicinity, he is liable to hear us."

"That is a very diplomatic way of telling someone to shut up, Cadet."

"I wouldn't know, sir," she said again.

Kimblee chuckled. "You must forgive me; I like to know the people I'm working with."

"I am a simple person, sir. There really isn't anything to know."

"We will agree to disagree. If I remember correctly, which I invariably do, Berthold Hawkeye was notorious for his disdain of the state alchemy program. I can't imagine he was particularly pleased to hear of your induction, Cadet."

"I enlisted after we buried him, Major. I joined the military so I could serve my country in a time of great crisis," she said, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. "That's all there is to it."

"You're lying."

She was silent as she searched for words to poison the arrow of her disdain.

He pitched his head forward, examining the faint, bruised bags pulling at her eyes. He was acutely aware of her holding her rifle across her chest, between them, but unless she had any immediate intentions of bonking him on the nose with the butt of it, he was in no danger. It would protect her from him as much as a panic blanket would protect a man from a psychotic episode.

"Each person is an enigma unto the other. Most, alas, can't begin to really know their fellows, especially those they are most intimate with," he shared a knowing look with her which she tried, and failed, to ignore, "because habit blurs them and hope blinds them to the truth. In short, Miss Hawkeye, no one is as they seem, and for the most part, our lives, aside from the occasional honest betrayal, are all lies and deceit. And the day you discover you are no different, the day you accept that truth, is the day you are set free. So... although poor manners are hideous to me, the only one you are really harming by lying is yourself."

"What do you want with me?" she hissed. She didn't use his honorific, he noticed. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because I admire you as certain dark things are to be admired, in secret, between the shadow and the soul," he said smoothly. "And I confess... I'm curious."

"Curious..."

"Why you are here. You are not a victim of circumstance. You are this war's willing participant, one who has nevertheless created her own anxiety through her insecurities and inactions. Why a woman with such evident distaste for this line of work and no stomach for the slaughter would sell her not inconsiderable talents to the Amestrian war machine is quite beyond me. Is it some sordid secret you've squirreled away from polite society?"

"I don't consider you polite society, sir."

Kimblee laughed at that, eyes shining with mirth. Judging by her expression, his was not the reaction she had been hoping for. "Well, then, you oughtn't have any qualms about sharing the information with me."

She looked askance at him, taking, to his surprise, a few shuffling steps away from him. But he had pressed her towards the edge of the rooftop, and there was nowhere left for her to go. Her boots dislodged a few pebbles as one boot lost its purchase.

In one swift motion, his hand hooked behind her back and pressed, _hard_ , on her spine to keep her from losing her balance, pulling her deftly onto solid ground.

She jerked as though he'd electrocuted her, and quite without her realizing it, had brought the butt of her rifle level with his cheek.

"Back problems, Miss Hawkeye?"

"Old injury," she muttered. The words dripped poison.

"Interesting. From friend or foe?"

She did not answer him, her head rearing back, eyeing him as one would a pit viper.

He snickered at the defiant little glare shot his way. "It's a common misconception that it is your enemies who are likeliest to hurt you. Rather, it is, always, those you trust. Those you love, even."

He took a step towards her. Her knuckles were white around her rifle.

"Miss Hawkeye, all alchemists covet something. Knowledge, power, money, the particulars are not important. Every man wants something he doesn't have." Kimblee put his hands on the sides of Miss Hawkeye's head, over her temporal lobes. He looked deep into her extraordinary eyes. He felt her seize under his grip, but, wary of two transmutation circles resting conspicuously on her temples, she did not try to pull away. Lowering his voice conspiratorially, Kimblee murmured, "I suspect what Roy Mustang coveted was not merely carnal, was it? And you are _terribly_ sensitive about that back of yours."

"Let me go."

"Butterfly effect, Miss Hawkeye." With painstaking rumination, the tips of his fingers grazed over her neck. Riza didn't move as his hand paused at the base of her throat, felt a bead of sweat there. As he stroked her skin, he felt the arrhythmic beating of her heart, her pulse thumping beneath his fingers. "A phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large, unintended effects elsewhere." His breath feathered over the shell of her ear. "I can't imagine you anticipated _these_ effects when you gave Roy Mustang the secret to flame alchemy, did you?"

With one mighty leap, Miss Hawkeye knocked his hands aside, landing on the rooftop a few feet away.

"If you touch me again, sir," she said, steeling herself against a shiver, "I'll take the matter up with Colonel Grand."

"That's your prerogative," he said, acknowledging her intention. Then, wickedly, he mused, "As it is mine to raise legitimate concerns over the possibility of fraternization between junior and senior officers, Cadet.

"Think on that..." he waved his hands at her, flashing two indigo arrays in the moonlight, "and _other things_ , if you ever try to threaten me again."

The girl was so petrified, so intent on keeping her curiously-guarded back facing away from him, that she didn't see the shadowy figure moving through the western sector before Kimblee did.

The shadow darted between the buildings, moving fast. He disappeared into and out of doorways, clambered over the low walls surrounding the compounds.

Kimblee grinned, the expression feral, and began to unbutton his uniform jacket.

"Target spotted, Miss Hawkeye," he breathed.

 **To Be Continued...**


	8. Circle VIII: Fraud

"Within that flame, Ulysses  
and Diomedes suffer; they, who went  
as one to rage, now share one punishment.  
And there, together in their flame, they grieve  
over the horse's fraud that caused a breach –  
the gate that let Rome's noble seed escape.  
There they regret the guile that makes the dead  
Deidamia still lament Achilles:  
and there, for the Palladium, they pay." ( _Inf_. XXVI, 55-63)

* * *

Circle VIII  
 _Fraud_

* * *

She snatched him by the collar before he managed to take a step.

"Let me go!"

"Captain," said Grace severely, not relaxing her grip. "You're _not_ going after him."

"I can't just abandon him!"

" _Maes_."

Hughes froze in his attempted flight and looked back at her, the whites of his eyes glistening. Grace's fist tightened until she felt her fingernails digging through the heavy wool fabric.

"Maes," said Grace again, softly, but firmly. "You can't get involved with this. You would be a man caught in a fight between monsters."

"They're gonna kill each other!" growled Hughes.

"That's well as may be… but that doesn't mean I have to let them kill you, too."

"You _know_ , Grace… you know as well as I do what that maniac's been doing…"

"Yes, I know. I also know we must grin and bear it, Hughes. For all our sakes."

Hughes leveled on her with an almost crushing intensity. His every muscle tautened like piano wire. "Are you aware of something I'm not, Grace?" he asked lowly, dangerously. "What's to keep me from marching over to Colonel Grand and getting Kimblee trussed in front of a board of tribunal?"

"In all likelihood, Colonel Grand himself," admitted Grace guardedly. "Maes… I can't help Major Mustang now, but I can help you. Please, stay away from Kimblee. The military brass won't be so easily parted from their favorite toy."

"Favorite toy…"

One green eye and one gray flashed a warning. "Listen to me, Captain," Grace leaned in close so no one overheard them. "Amestris believes that in order to win this war –– decisively –– it ought to possess the best possible weapons. By the term you might mistake me for referring to some sort of firearm, or even the state alchemists as a concept. But Major Kimblee has something more, Maes. He cannot be touched."

Maes snarled, "Soldiers have been known to disappear, Grace. Don't matter how indispensable they think they are."

The Kaolin Alchemist's grip twisted a fraction of a degree. "I am very well aware of what happened to Brigadier Fessler, Captain," she whispered hoarsely. "And I assure you, Crimson's superiors would not allow their pet to be so easily culled. The fact that these goosestepping morons are totally unacquainted with the power they've given that man has lent itself to the illusion that, by virtue of Kimblee's alchemy, they will instantly become formidable. A true superpower.

"They believe that Kimblee's operation amounts to little more than pointing and pulling a trigger, and that he will obediently deliver, unerring and as fast as light, death at a great distance." Her voice hardened. "And they _will not_ part with their weapon, Maes. No matter the number of misfires. Do you understand me?"

Hughes shook his head. Grace knew he didn't really comprehend what was happening, or how that night had changed them and the course of that interminable war, but some part of him seemed to understand that things would never be the same again. Something had ended and something was definitely beginning… Hughes just didn't have the necessary insight to know what.

But there was nothing to be done… Roy Mustang was on his own.

As, thought Grace sadly, was young Riza Hawkeye.

* * *

 **Elsewhere**

After unbuttoning, folding, and setting his uniform jacket aside, Kimblee went to stand at the rooftop's edge. The wind lifted his hair into a long black contrail, and his undershirt seemed to glow in the pale moonlight. He pitched forward on his toes, tracking the figure just barely visible downwind of their nest. Occasionally, his eyes jumped between the chalk markers Riza had made that previous afternoon. He didn't blink as he performed the complex calculations necessary to catalyze his alchemy.

The strange thing about it, thought Riza, was how everything, all of Ishval, all of existence, was in that moment covered in a thick, still blanket of silence. Solf Kimblee's well-toned arms stretched wide, as though to trap the world entire between his palms. The Alchemist seemed to her in that moment colder and more distant than ever. Riza could feel it, and though he didn't make a sound, she imagined she could hear his laughter –– taste it, even. Sharp. Saccharine. Mocking. He was cruel in his confidence and undaunted in his detachment as he surveyed the skeletal remains of the city.

Riza felt the air shudder, static crackle along her scalp. She glanced up at Kimblee's hands. Energy snapped between his fingertips. And then it happened: he brought his palms together. Their collision washed out all definition in the desert and the sky, leaving nothing visible but the awful purity of crimson light. The first blast of hot air lifted Riza from her perch, throwing her onto her back. She blinked up into the night sky; cinders glowed orange as they fell towards the rooftop. She heard the roar: a guttural, thunderous growl, like some eldritch horror loosed upon the world.

"Listen to that, Riza Hawkeye," Kimblee said from somewhere above her. His words were hushed with awe. "Such a beautiful symphony. The exquisite sounds of our lives preparing to drain into the sands of this desert like so much blood…"

Kimblee kept his palms together, his explosions thundering in concentric circles, growing tighter and more volatile, corralling their quarry towards the clearing.

Riza picked up her sniper rifle. Through the eyepiece, she could see the shadowy figure navigating the labyrinthine streets, dodging debris and exploding buildings. It was impossible for her to get a good look at him. From her angle across the district, a cluster of tenements prevented the sniper from seeing all of him, and the fire and fury from Kimblee's transmutations further obscured the view. Though she had the target downrange, Riza found she couldn't commit herself entirely to killing him.

"Target spotted, Major," was all she said, tasting blood. Riza wondered if she'd bit through her tongue. She stood from her crouch in a futile effort to find a better angle. "But I can't get a positive ID on him, sir."

Kimblee didn't break his focus from his alchemy when he ordered her: "As soon as you're able, Officer Cadet, take the shot."

Riza almost pulled her rifle to her shoulder. "Sir?"

"Shoot him."

"Major, we don't know if this is our assassin…"

"What ambiguity do you imagine is at work here, Miss Hawkeye?"

"There's a chance he's not our man, sir!"

Kimblee rounded on her, the motion sudden and jarring, making her jump. His stare seemed over-bright, wild, like lightning. "We are at war," he said simply, quietly. " _Anyone_ hiding in Amestrian-held territory is our enemy."

"We don't know that, sir!"

He sneered at her. "The sign of the amateur soldier is overthinking of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her job."

In a moment, Riza forgot all dimensions of decorum, and spat at her commanding officer with venom in her words: "It is not my job to murder innocents!"

Something about her statement, at once an attempt at explanation and a plea for forbearance, lured the monster into Kimblee's eyes. The hand appeared from nowhere and tightened on Riza's wrist, white knuckled, incredibly strong. The palm was still searingly hot. She turned to brush it off but found her feet dragging across the rooftop as she was pulled off balance. Kimblee twisted her arm up into the middle of her back with one hand while the other hand wrapped around her throat, pulling her spine flush against the Alchemist's lean front.

"Tell me who is innocent, Riza," he breathed into her ear as she struggled against him. "Your orders are to kill every Ishvalan you encounter. Mothers, fathers, sad, lonely little girls... every one of them is your enemy. Where is the battlefield? In the heart of your despair. How is victory won? By casting aside all personal disinclinations and taking the difficult shots. All you need to do is choose to recognize them when they come along. Failing that," Riza felt a chuckle vibrate through his sternum, "you could always run away. But then, I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't pursue you. After all... those who kill will always have killers chase them in return... isn't that right?"

Riza planted her free elbow in Kimblee ribs and twisted herself out of his grip. She glared daggers at the Alchemist, amber eyes almost burning in the sodium light of the distant transmutations. For a long, _long_ moment, Hawkeye seriously considered shooting Kimblee on the spot. She turned her rifle, instead, to the darting black figure at the edge of the district. Kimblee's explosions had begun to quiet, and an oily black smoke hung low over the ruins of Daliha, rendering visibility down to almost nought.

Riza tried to focus on her target, and not the heady scent of the man standing at her back. It became especially difficult when, against all probability, he began once again to hum, quietly, to himself.

There were souls, thought Riza, whose connection to the world had never been severed. Who were never weaned from the primordial fires of the universe. Souls like Kimblee's, who did not understand death as an enemy, who seemed to anticipate rot and destruction and decay as a maestro anticipates a crescendo. To him, the world's impression in his mind was neither one of tragedy nor of comedy. It was manifold and various; there were tears and laughter, happiness and woe; it was tedious and interesting and indifferent; it was sad and despairing. It was joyful. And always, neither good nor bad. It just _was_ –– laying in front of him as a sheet of music, soundless before its playing.

Solf J. Kimblee wielded a conductor's baton and called it alchemy.

The pitch and rhythm that made up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shaped his performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they changed over time… all the elements of a noise that distinguished between the sound of a human being erupting into blood and brain matter and an entire city collapsing in on itself… all were expressed by the patterns and hierarchies of his alchemy.

It was so simple. It was all a science to him, objective and unbiased, part of that unending search for reason and truth. But while Riza knew Solf J. Kimblee would not have fought for less than the truth, it was the fighting he really loved, in some ways _more_ than truth.

Riza closed her eyes, opened them again. She lifted the rifle to her cheek as one might fit a violin under one's chin, and set the bow to the strings.

The first thing that came to mind was the sound of her fingers breaking. Her life, as she knew it, ending. The shock and the pain of it, and the utter devastation.

He's killed me, she thought.

"If you can't take a life, Riza Hawkeye," said Kimblee quietly, close by her side, "you'll never be able to protect _his_."

Resurfacing unbidden, was a sudden memory of warm, strong hands reaching for hers in the darkness. Clasping her fingers, healing her, lending her strength and reassurance.

Then came the tentative unfurling, when she believed against all evidence to the contrary –– despite the cinders and smoke that remained of once-great cities and the despair that remained of her dreams –– that the person who came to her in the darkness would help her in any way he could. The impossible warmth and weight of his arm, sliding around her shoulders.

The burning that took hold, the incandescent light that shone despite all the shadows stacked around them. The unbearable, delicious hunger that was the sweetest pain… the realization she would give anything, _anything_ , if only she could feel it again…

And then Riza Hawkeye felt the beauty in the music, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she felt so exposed, allowing the acceptance to bleed out of her fingertips into the walnut stock and steel bolt of her rifle, playing her heart's cry for every single wretched soul, for the loss of innocence of every generation consequent of what would happen –– _of_ _what had already happened_ –– by her hand in the killing fields of Ishval.

Riza spotted the target in her crosshairs.

She took the shot, and watched the figure fall.

Even as her quarry –– a man dressed in white –– collapsed, something heavy connected with the back of Riza's head. She spun, vision going dark, reaching behind her hip for a fresh magazine as her knees gave way, and everything went black...

* * *

 _"One good day, we will see... arising a strand of smoke... over the far horizon on the sea..._

 _"He will call Butterfly from the distance..."_

The blonde woman pitched forward on her knees, the empty rifle bouncing away, the chamber still locked open from her ejecting the spent bullet. Kimblee looked at the chunk of granite masonry in his hand and, from where he'd cracked the rock across Miss Hawkeye's skull, a small spatter of red.

His tongue lapped at the stone's cool, grainy surface. His scalp prickled when he tasted the rusty bite of the girl's blood.

"My sincerest apologies, Miss Hawkeye," he hummed, crouching down beside the unconscious soldier. "But the answer to my earlier query is there's no such thing as innocence anymore, my dear... there is only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something pure, but you aren't. You are handicapped by everything you don't yet understand. You have grown up too quickly, I think...

"The world does not judge us by some measure of our intrinsic worth. Guilty men can hold power their whole lives and be wept for when they pass. Innocent men can be spent like coins because it's convenient. You don't have to have sinned for them to ruin you. If your destruction is useful to them, you'll be destroyed. And the only people liable to grow bitter about such a sad state of affairs are those unable to bend it to their will."

Perhaps power was like that, he mused to himself; not a negotiation between equal parties but a detonation of dreams and light and lust that could find no outlet in everyday life. Only spectacle would suffice.

And perhaps that was the real reason he was so partial to his glorious fireworks.

"I have high hopes for you in that regard, Riza Hawkeye," he went on, aloud, even though she couldn't hear him: "You have the potential to metamorphose into the most exquisitely perfect killer.

"You are not a victim. If nothing else, find some small, twisted comfort in knowing that you have used each other, you and your Flame Alchemist. Him, for a glimpse into what it would have been like to live the life he so desperately desired, and you for the steady diet of pain and emotional damage that seems to make you better, sharper, like a sword against a whetstone... you are made anew with each tragedy."

After a few quick mental computations where he considered trajectory angles relative to their distance from the explosions, Kimblee set the chunk of granite at a calculated proximity to Miss Hawkeye's head. The girl's short hair was ruffled from her fall, the strands sticking together in the way they do when a wash is long overdue. Curiously, her pretty face, far from displaying any alarm or pain, was flushed from the heat of the transmutations, a touch of color where before there had been sallowness. He could hear her heart thumping in accordance with her slow, shallow breaths. Serenity was plastered across her face as she slept. She seemed almost peaceful.

Kimblee's contemplative moue hardened into a frown as he slid his finger under the neck of her undershirt, gently eased the collar aside with the pad of his thumb.

 _Igni Natura Renovatur Integra_ lay splashed across the knob of her spine in neat red ink.

"Hmm..." Kimblee tapped the code in consideration. "Also from Paracelsus's _Philosophia Sagax_ _. Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest._ 'Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.' Really, Master Hawkeye... you ought to have heeded your own council.

"Let no daughter belong to another who can belong to herself."

Then he stood, and made for the _Sadagh's_ staircase.

"Now then," he murmured. "Let us go see what manner of master you're to be freed from, Miss Hawkeye...

 _"All this will happen... I promise you this... Hold back your fears –– I with secure faith wait for him."_

* * *

 **Elsewhere**

"Fuck..."

Turning on his side, Roy Mustang felt the friction from the rough Daliha street burn his exposed skin. The movement sent a shard of pain through to the back of his skull. Ignoring the protest of his shoulder, senses sharpened with adrenaline, Roy held his breath, straining to hear with every ounce of his concentration. The city was not quite silent. Cool night air whispered through empty windows and sagging doorways. The aftershocks of Kimblee's alchemy rumbled through the marrow of his bones. His head hummed as he struggled to right himself. Roy's ears strained for more sounds, more clues as to where the gunshot had originated.

If he found their nest, he'd find _her_.

Blood soaked his white combat jacket, radiating outward. The bullet had crushed the soft tissue of his shoulder, in through his deltoid and out at an angle through his trapezius muscle. Going by the sheer force of the impact, and the proximity to the articulation of the joint, he needed surgical exploration and debridement desperately.

An expert shot. If he'd been standing still, he'd be dead.

He didn't expect anything less from Riza Hawkeye.

With some difficulty and more muttered cursing, Roy rose to his feet. In his effort to staunch the bleeding, he'd stained one of his white gloves crimson. The nerves pulsated around the wound, the pain intensifying with each dragging breath.

"Oh good... she didn't kill you."

The man didn't saunter. He didn't amble. He approached Roy leisurely, perfectly postured, his stance straight and sure. He kept his hands in his trouser pockets and regarded Roy with a look that, if it were worn by any other man, might have been pity.

"Kimblee," growled Mustang, clutching his shoulder, his face closed in a grimace. "What the hell have you done..."

"You are going to have to be more specific, Major Flame."

"Cut the bullshit, Crimson!" he snarled. "There is no Ishvalan assassin. There is no Aerugonian arms smuggling. There's just you... you and your alchemy. A concentrated transmutation, correct? Small enough to pass for a bullet wound, but powerful enough to cause severe cavitation and burning."

Kimblee tilted his head thoughtfully. "Did Dr. Lambert Rosin finally figure it out? No offense, Mustang, but deductive aptitude is not one of your cardinal virtues."

"Shut up!" Roy clutched his shoulder so hard he saw red. "Why did you do it, Kimblee?" he demanded. "Why murder your own soldiers... torture the Cadet like you did..." Each word was like a brand on Roy's skin.

"I told you already..." Kimblee held his hands out, palms up, two indigo-inked transmutation circles glowing red. "She presents an interesting case study. I was curious."

"Curious..."

"Curious as to whether or not she held any manner of pride or satisfaction in her skills. Curious as to whether or not _you_ understood the butterfly effect of your having put on this uniform, or more pertinently, your having solicited the secrets of flame alchemy in the first place."

Roy felt suddenly dizzy. He opened his mouth to say something –– to deny what the other Alchemist was implying –– but he found he couldn't form the words.

Kimblee's grin would have gone on for a mile if it could. "A boy made of soldiering and selfishness; a girl filled with fire and fury at the world. You are a tangle of emotional wreckage, two broken souls thrown together, trying to navigate something you do not comprehend.

 _"But I do._ I corroborated my hypothesis the moment Riza Hawkeye pulled that trigger."

"All of this," murmured Roy: his legs shook; his skin felt clammy; he suspected he was not long for going into shock... "All of it... it's just an experiment to you?"

"Why not? There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than the unraveling of two creatures who have staked their very being on those same conceits. One alchemist to another, Roy Mustang: you have become that scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker boiling in your lab. By the providence of sheer physical proximity, you've been infected by your own delusions of grace.

"After all... look at how quick she was to shoot you!"

"You manipulated her!"

"And did I manipulate her into giving you the secrets of Flame Alchemy? Oh no, Roy Mustang. Her corruption is entirely your doing. While her image might preside in your mind as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose in that dark, guilt-ridden world of yours, your great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with the great risk of having your happiness taken from you –– to teeter, eternally, on the edge of loss. At the very least..." he laughed –– a cruel, crooked sound, "she has something to fight for, now. I have achieved perfect equivalence!"

Ignoring the screaming of his shoulder, Roy made a motion to snap his ignition cloth –– but Kimblee lunged, moving quickly, _too_ quickly. The fist that came sailing at jaw level snapped Roy's head to one side. As the pain hit, Roy let his own rage fly. The fear for Riza, the pent-up hatred of the Crimson Alchemist, the frustration of being an unwitting subject in the man's machinations... all of it burst like suppuration from a blister. Roy tackled the taller man into the street. Kimblee seemed momentarily surprised, as though he hadn't expected Roy's speed or strength given his injuries, and Roy took advantage of the hesitation. He clocked Kimblee in the mouth and leapt back, trying to create enough space to set the bastard's hair on fire. Kimblee's lips twisted in a feral smile and he made a grab for Roy's throat. A second later, the Flame Alchemist was flat on his back, black spots dancing in his field of vision, with Kimblee planting a knee in his sternum. Crimson took Roy's face in his hand, hot under the array, and _squeezed_ , crunching Roy's features together. It was nearly impossible to breathe, and Roy began to pant shallowly.

Kimblee leaned in close until their noses touched, until Roy could smell the smolder on his skin. "Is that all you've got, Flame?" he asked, smirking infuriatingly.

Roy bellowed in anger and threw his head forward, relishing the _crack_ as blood exploded from Kimblee's nostrils. Staggering to his feet, consumed by the stifling fog of fury in his head, Roy threw himself at the other man, swinging a fist into his face. He growled in triumph as bone connected with Crimson's cheek, hoping it hurt the bastard as much as it hurt Roy's knuckles. Roy's growl soon turned into a yelp of pain as Kimblee hooked his boots around Roy's ankle and tugged. The fall knocked the wind out of his lungs as he collapsed, gasping. Planting a toe in his ribs, Kimblee rolled Roy onto his stomach, twisted his arms over his head, locking them in place with a grip strong enough to bend steel. The Crimson Alchemist took and tore his ignition cloth gloves into white shreds, and then he pressed the heel of his palm, _hard_ , into Roy's shoulder.

And Roy _screamed_ , blood oozing from the bullet wound, the edges of the rend grinding together. The pain that once burned like fire soon began to fade away to an icy numbness. Black encroached on the edges of his vision as the muscles and cartilage clicked against each other, eating away at his insides, tearing at the tissue there. He didn't even feel Kimblee run a finger around ragged edges of the entry wound.

"Well well," muttered the other Alchemist, his voice seeming to come from a very great distance, "this won't do at all. If Miss Hawkeye ever sees this," he plunged a finger into the wound, "she's liable to do something regrettable, and I imagine you're as keen as I am to prevent that, no? This war is far more interesting with the pair of you in it. So...

"Let's turn this into something that's not a bullet wound..."

Though he could barely make out the details through the haze, Roy watched as Kimblee picked up a shard of glass from the street. Its rough edge glinted, and Kimblee held it against Roy's torn combat cloak, positioned it at the bullet hole in his flesh.

 _Curious as to whether or not _you_ understood the butterfly effect of your having solicited the secrets of flame alchemy in the first place._

As he slipped into unconsciousness, Roy suddenly realized that no matter how much he tried, he would never be able to fully protect Riza from the dangers and risks of that war, from the world he had lured her in to. Because no matter how much he might love her –– no matter how much he might give of himself to her –– she could never be content with that alone. Her vision extended beyond him, just as it extended beyond herself, to the dreams of his youth and the future they once thought to create together, before their fate became so cruel.

And to take that away from her, whether by force or even by persuasion, would be to diminish her soul. And to take away part of what he'd fallen in love with in the first place.

 _By the providence of sheer physical proximity, you've been infected by your own delusions of grace._

She was not his to love. Not any more.

When Kimblee began to cut, Roy didn't feel it.

 **To Be Continued...**


	9. Circle IX: Treachery

O reader, do not ask of me how I  
grew faint and frozen then – I cannot write it:  
all words would fall far short of what it was.  
I did not die, and I was not alive;  
think for yourself, if you have any wit,  
what I became, deprived of life and death.  
The emperor of the despondent kingdom  
so towered from the ice, up from midchest,  
that I match better with a giant's breadth  
than giants match the measure of his arms…( _Inf_. XXXIV, 22-31)

* * *

Circle IX

 _Treachery_

* * *

"You're not eating enough, Flame."

Kimblee's back was a taut strap of bone and strained muscle under the weight of Roy Mustang, the latter's arms over the former's shoulders. The Flame Alchemist was a man who gave an impression of heaviness, sagging under those indefatigable moral burdens of his –– his shoulders sagged, his dark eyes sagged, his uniform sagged, as though his disappointments with the world were bearing down on him.

But he was surprisingly light, realized Kimblee, hefting the other alchemist as he made slow progress back towards the Amestrian billet. The Major had passed out soon after Kimblee had twisted the glass into the bullet wound, slicing the flesh into an asymmetrical gouge of torn muscle and sinew. Cutting the casings out, and turning the injury into something that did not look like a bolt action rifle shot. Nothing that Rosin woman couldn't fix, and nothing to raise too many eyebrows, either.

It was just as well the man had passed out, mused Kimblee. Screaming, much like puncture trauma from an Amestrian sniper rifle, risked the wrong sort of attention.

One hand bounced limply against Kimblee's ribs. Flame's limbs had grown lanky in the past several months, the stomach pressing into Kimblee's spine concave. Mustang's hips jutted to two sharp points. It was as though whatever was tormenting him was eating him alive like a tapeworm, using his body for some slow-burning transmutation of flesh into guilt.

"You cannot regret for a moment, Roy Mustang," murmured Kimblee, turning to the tuft of black hair near his temple. "Look at you... the present moment's corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. Every damn fool thing you do in this life you pay for. Why lament the rate of interest when you're the one who opened the account?"

As Kimblee neared the edge of the city, a flock of birds lit from the scrub and brush near the arroyo. Crows, he noted, or vultures. The branches of the spindly junipers shook with their absent weight as the birds circled above his head, where they made an artless semaphore, screaming amongst themselves. Kimblee's gaze rose skyward. The sun was soon for coming up, but the moon hung low on the opposite horizon, the pale silver light cutting through the morning sky.

It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of an expertly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world seemed paper-thin in that moment, so far as Kimblee could tell. A piece of kindling. The chitin of a butterfly wing.

"You thought I was after your alchemy, didn't you?" he murmured, thinking back to the red ink on Miss Hawkeye's scapulae. He chuckled, tasted sand and sweat on his pallet, an effervescence like carbonated light. "What a vain creature you are..."

Kimblee leaned into the other man, breathing in the scent of him. The Crimson Alchemist's aquiline nose tickled Flame's scalp.

"Mmm, high gloss wax," he decided, smiling against Roy Mustang's hair. "Rifle polish."

They were like a pair of animals licking their wounds, he thought. Copulating in the dark. The images the scents conjured did not quite mesh in his mind, though they thrilled him in their aim to unsettle, as though he had entered a cathedral for high mass and found instead people fucking on the altar.

Kimblee felt a familiar sensation, then, as he listened for a new rhythm from his inner voice, turning to strain his ear towards the cadence –– a composition born from his labored breathing, the screaming of the crows, the dust under his boots, Roy Mustang's sedate heartbeats, the desert wind, the soft press of sand… and deeper, sitting in his guts, a red Power burning against the lining of his stomach.

The pain hit him like a cracked rib even as it made his innards coil in pleasure. The harmony knotted his belly and pushed all the air from his lungs, so that he rocked on his heels and fought the urge to clutch at his chest. He looked around him, taking small gulps. His vision blanked as images of glory stirred behind his eyes, inevitable and ineffably sensuous as he stood, grinning and opened mouthed and panting, fingers pressing into Flame's thick black hair. Kimblee imagined tearing Mustang's eyelids apart like some illusory seal. He envisioned raking his tattooed hands over Flame's precious subordinate, putting his palms to her exquisite back, and deconstructing the canvas. Making her sing.

In his mind, he picked up a pen and hastily began to write. The effort made him shake as he traced the threads of meaning from image to science to sound: he felt the chains of anticipation thrown across his chest. They tore at him and dug into his flesh and made him want to scream with pleasure.

That exquisite War... lavishly colored, exquisitely scored with ecstasies and agonies, born from the functional expression of destruction, from the infernal vocations that put his very soul at risk. Every time he watched _them_ sob in sorrow or laugh in joy, he felt himself steered by a glorious storm of sensual and sublime resurrection within the deepest parts of his being. With each tear and drop of blood shed in moments of excruciating pain, his mind constructed majestic new movements to aid in the pursuit of his passions, his private lusts –– and, above all else, in the pursuit of truth.

He would deliver Roy Mustang, and then return for Riza Hawkeye, he decided. They were far too delicious to discard.

Then... on to Kanda.

Solf J. Kimblee was ready for the real fireworks to begin...

* * *

 **Later**

Riza Hawkeye had never been one to believe in –– or be fearful of –– any manifestations of divinity. It seemed especially difficult for her to place her faith in a principle of universal love when the greatest miracles she ever knew were not getting shredded by shrapnel or shot between the eyes. The gods had abandoned Ishval... which was in some ways the root cause of the entire conflict. Ishvalla seemed to neither know nor care about the suffering of His people. In religion, as in war, the mainstays of consolation provided by faith were things no one could seize in the act of looking for them. If one searched for comfort on the fields of battle, one would find only false hope and wishful thinking at the advent and then, over time, despair.

But, as Riza's eyes cracked open, and she stared into the scruffy face of Maes Hughes, his green eyes wide with genuine concern, the Officer Cadet was, for a moment, tempted to believe in divine providence.

"Welcome back," he said softly. Riza felt a cool hand on her neck as Maes eased her head up; the pain that erupted behind her eyes made her wonder if someone had ground her sockets against a stone. "We were worried you'd gone the way of those other nine soldiers."

"No, sir," said Riza throatily, her mouth dry, her tongue wilted.

"Not for lack of trying, eh?"

Riza made a grunt of acknowledgement. She tried to turn her head to look around but even the small motion smarted in the base of her skull. She winced. "What happened?"

Maes had the good grace to look shamefaced. "Nothing the lot of us can take any credit for. The Major brought you home."

It hurt to roll her eyes in Maes's direction. "Major Mustang... where––"

"No, Riza," he corrected her gently. "Major Kimblee."

She made the truly herculean effort of trying to sit up, crunching sore abdominal muscles. She counted herself strangely fortunate she hadn't had anything to eat since before the stakeout; Riza doubted Maes would thank her for voiding the contents of her stomach all over his uniform. She rested the back of her head on the cot's headrail. Her vision stung as a single drop of sweat snaked down her brow. She blinked it out, and was rocked with the bright after-light burning like a magnesium flare behind her closed eyes.

Once settled, the floodgates opened, and suddenly Riza was floundering in the madness of the past few days, her terror and confusion and a deep, nauseating shame. Her hands fisted in the sheets. The fabric was scratchy but cool, a welcome texture as she stared blankly at the tiny abrasions ingrained in the surface of the canvas opposite her head.

Maes allowed Riza her moment of weakness, keeping a firm hand on her shoulder. The contact was comforting.

"Knox tells me you suffered pretty significant blast injuries," he said, sobering, his voice low and grave. "That lunatic may have carried you back here, but I reckon he did it outta of whatever twisted emotion passes for guilt inside that head of his. His explosive alchemy sent out blast overpressure waves. Bit of rubble got you on the back of the skull... you've been out two days. You're fortunate your tympanic membrane wasn't perforated, though you've got a hell of a concussion. Grace suspects––"

"Maes," interrupted Riza, her voice steely; the way the man's mouth hung open was almost comical, "where is Major Kimblee now?"

Hughes's jaw clenched, his back molars grinding against each other softly, before he said, his words slow and purposeful. "He's been reassigned... part of the Kanda offensive. He's stationed in Dairut now, twenty miles northeast of here. Him and the rest of the State Alchemists. Grace and Roy left yesterday."

Hawkeye's fierce self-containment had become almost a second skin to her, easy to forget it existed, so she didn't always remember that lying was actually an art, and people who weren't meticulous about crafting their fictions were easily exposed.

People like Maes Hughes, whose bright green eyes were just a touch too wide, too earnest, to affect a convincing lie.

Secrets resist those not born into them.

Maes went on, not quite meeting Riza's hard stare. "The attacking force should be circumvallating the city by sundown. The rest of the 27th –– that's me, you, and a few others –– are set to deploy sometime in the next couple of days. Then command will let the State Alchemists loose."

Riza felt a coldness drive into her belly, her tongue beginning to tingle.

"It's all going to end soon, isn't it?" she murmured. "He's going to slaughter them all..."

A muscle twitched involuntarily at the corner of Maes's right eye, his mouth forming a rigid grimace. With arms folded tightly across his broad chest, he began to tap his foot furiously and all the while stared somewhere past Riza's shoulder, as though afraid direct eye contact would suck the secrets right out of him. "Riza... listen to me. About Kimblee––"

"She awake?"

Maes choked on whatever he was about to say as a massive man pushed his way into the medical tent. His head brushed the canvas ceiling, and he threw a shadow over both Riza and Hughes. The Captain swallowed thickly and snapped a salute. Riza followed suite, her bladed hand rising to her forehead, sitting up so quickly her vision blurred and darkened, and questions flew furiously through her mind.

Why is the commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion here to see me? wondered Riza, looking up –– way up –– at the newcomer. Surely, Colonel Basque Grand, the Iron-Blood Alchemist, had more important things to do. If what Maes said was true, and the State Alchemists had begun to deploy to Dairut and Kanda, then the Colonel ought to have been elsewhere.

"How are you feeling, Officer Cadet?" rumbled Grand in a curt, clipped way that told Riza he had asked for the sake of convention but didn't particularly care one way or another. His apparent lack of concern only amplified Hawkeye's bemusement.

"Better, sir," she managed, trying to sound less shaken than she felt. Since Hughes didn't drop his perennial look of concern, Riza surmised the effort was not entirely successful. Though the Iron-Blood Alchemist didn't seem to notice.

Grand's beetle-black, fiercely intelligent eyes swung to Hughes, who stood cemented in a salute. "You may go, Captain."

Maes's adam's apple bobbed. "Sir..."

"That was an order, not a suggestion, Hughes," he growled, his mustache bristling. "Get out."

Hughes spared one more glance at Riza –– meeting her stare for the first time, and startling her with weight of anguish in his eyes –– before ducking around Colonel Grand and slinking out into the desert.

Grand waited until Maes's footsteps faded to silence before stating: "I'm here for your debrief, Cadet."

"Sir," replied Riza dutifully, her voice steady, betraying nothing of her heart thumping violently against her ribcage. She wondered, again, what about her injury had necessitated the Colonel's presence –– any senior officer could have given the debrief. She inferred, then, that Grand wanted to hear her report regarding the measures and assessment of her performance firsthand before it became a matter of military record.

She swallowed her apprehension and, under the covers, fisted her hand to keep herself from shaking.

"What do you remember before you lost consciousness, Hawkeye?" The question thrummed through her bones, making the back of her chest vibrate.

Major Kimblee's behaviour towards his subordinate was grossly inappropriate... and he threatened me with the fraternization regs if I went to you about it, sir, thought Riza to herself, a taste like copper in her mouth.

Aloud, she relayed:

"We followed the known route through Daliha with the purpose of investigating the deaths of our squadmates and noting features of interest as part of our reconnaissance assignment, sir. We monitored the area until nightfall."

"You stationed yourself at the temple, correct?"

"Yes, sir... the _Sadagh_ in the eastern sector of the district. 22A."

"And was Major Kimblee able to activate his arrays from that location? Remotely?"

"Affirmative, sir. The explosions succeeded in drawing the bogey to our position. I was ordered by the Major to take the first available shot. I don't..." Riza took a deep breath, "I don't remember anything after that, sir."

"I see," was all the Colonel said for a long time, turning and sorting Riza's words as though trying to sift some deception from them, like parsing gold from magnetite sand. A cold sweat erupted on the back of her neck, a single drop carving a caress down her spine.

Riza drew a deep breath, trying to think of something more to say, and went to open her mouth when Colonel Grand boomed:

"Officer Cadet," he began, in a slow, dangerous tone of voice that made Riza's blood run cold, "in order to protect the integrity of ongoing military operations in Ishval, you are not to disclose any detail of this mission to anyone. To protect this sensitive information you will be required to sign a statement to the effect that you will agree to abide by the restrictions of Amestris's National Defense Authorization Act. It should be noted that your signiture is purely formal, as the Act is a law, not a contract, and you as a soldier and Amestrian citizen are bound by it whether or not you have signed it.

"So far as everyone outside this pavilion is concerned, Officer Cadet, you never left the billet. Major Kimblee never engaged the bogey in Daliha. This mission never happened. Am I making myself quite clear?"

"Is this a gag order, sir?" asked Riza instead, tempering outright insubordination with genuine bemusement.

"Yes it is," growled Grand, his eyes glittering, the livid white scar on his swarthy features twitching. "Is that going to be a problem, Officer Cadet?"

In an instant, Riza _knew_. To a certain extent, she had anticipated Grand's purpose from his presence, and her mind had instinctively prepared itself for the hammer fall by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that instant, a kaleidoscope of half-guessed possibilities projected themselves into Riza's thoughts, and where foreboding had been before there was a feeling of cognizance, and a curiosity.

What, exactly, about the mission demanded such secrecy? It was more than Kimblee's unusual behavior –– or rather, his perfectly typical behavior. Riza conjectured something had happened while she was unconscious... something Maes hadn't mustered the wherewithal to tell her before Grand's entrance.

"Is that going to be a problem?" repeated Grand, looming over Riza, his arms crossed, massive iron gauntlets clinking against each other.

Riza, however, did not shrink back from him. She met his small eyes with a quiet sort of defiance. "What of the nine soldiers, sir?" she asked.

"Those nine men are missing in action, Officer Cadet. We never recovered them. Clear?"

Hawkeye turned to her right, and saw three of those very same nine under white bedsheets, directly across from her in the medical pavilion, ready to be deposited in the mass grave beyond the hill. She didn't look away from the dead bodies as she murmured, "Yes, sir."

Grand straightened, turning to depart without a backward glance. "Someone from defense will be by to have you sign the necessary forms," he muttered over his shoulder. "As soon as Knox discharges you, you will be deployed to Kanda."

"Understood, Colonel."

The Iron Blood Alchemist returned grimly to his task. Despite his brutal face and intimidating presence, there was something almost regal about him, Riza thought: a stalwartness she couldn't help but admire. He was a holdout who refused to give up his post. The last watchmen at the end of the world.

"Sir!" she called, raising herself on her hands. Colonel Grand paused.

"What?"

"The Ishvalan assassin... did I get him, sir?"

Grand's glower bore into the desert landscape as he relayed stoically: "You must have misunderstood me, Hawkeye," he said, his words acidic: "There was no Ishvalan assassin. There was no reconnaissance mission. You never left this camp, and those men are missing in action... not murdered."

Finally, Riza's hand unclenched. Her eyes drifted up to the canvas ceiling. "My apologies, sir," she murmured. "I was mistaken."

"Apology accepted, Cadet. Get some rest. Be ready to ship out by tomorrow."

"Sir."

Then, he was gone. And so was all official record of her mission with Solf J. Kimblee.

Riza Hawkeye didn't bridle at the censorship. The Amestrian military drew propaganda and misinformation, if not outright mistruth, around itself like a damask. But the situation with Major Kimblee went beyond official wartime secrets and gag orders. Human beings by nature fear storms and vicious beasts, much in the same way Riza feared the Crimson Alchemist, but she admitted that she did not want to erase him from her memories any more than she wanted wild animals to be caged –– ignorance courted forgetullness, a luxury Riza had consigned to denying herself. But if those like Basque Grand felt they must guard the public mind from the evil influences of those like Kimblee, to some degree, they were admitting a certain seductive appeal to the Alchemist. To his insanity. His brilliance. His power.

Perhaps Bradley's leash on the Crimson Alchemist was not as secure as he originally thought. The prospect, and the fear that came with it, burned the back of Riza's throat like bile.

Dusk was falling outside the tent. A small lantern had been left by her bedside –– by Knox, by Maes, she couldn't say –– and as the sunlight dimmed, the lamplight seemed to brighten. As she shifted to stand from the bed, swinging her legs to the floor, she was for a moment lost in the sway of her elongated shadow dancing like a timid ghost on the canvas wall, thinking –– or imagining –– that the specter was in some way an extension of her body –– her soul, perhaps.

That somehow, maybe, when she was dead, her shadow would remain there, burned into the desert.

Like the silhouettes impressed on the cinders and rubble Roy left in his wake. Echoes and recurrences of their destruction, reflections of themselves, a refrain like poetic fixed forms. Villanelle, virelay, sestina.

Song. Symphonies –– pieces of light, love, history, stars, sadness –– strung together with alchemy and agony.

Riza raised her arms, a pupa shrugging silk from its wings, let them sway languidly, her torso twisting. She watched her shadow stagger from note to note; then, she almost imagined she could hear it.

The music.

And standing before it all, a conductor with long, dark hair and bright eyes, tossing his wand exuberantly through the air, drowning with musical thunders the silence and the suffering.

Riza felt her shoulders beginning to shake, and dropped her arms, thinking herself exhausted. It was only when her eyes began to sting, and the tears to fall, that she understood the tremor came from somewhere else entirely.

Acid filled Riza's mouth.

It wasn't fair.

That's what she wanted to say. To scream at the top of her lungs.

It just wasn't fair.

* * *

 **One War Later**

 **The Central Command Center of the Amestrian Military**

She had once resented her commanding officer for sending her on archive runs.

Her ego was not so inflated that the irritation came from doing a job she deemed beneath her station –– though she was the foremost firearms expert in the military, First Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye was a soldier, and duty-bound to obey orders, irrespective of the lengths of administrative red tape that needed cutting or rows of dingy bookcases that needed sorting.

The irritation, rather, came from her knowing that her jaunts to the archive room were due to the fact that her commanding officer, Colonel Roy Mustang, couldn't be arsed to do the work himself.

But the Colonel was no longer her commanding officer, thought Riza as she marched through Central Command's high-ceilinged corridors, her throat knotting involuntarily.

The military archives, a warren of tightly-knit rooms in the partitioned basement of Central Command, was dank and smelled of cigarettes. Riza could imagine Jean Havoc coming down there during his breaks and smoking himself to death amidst the mildewy files. The walls and ceilings had a yellow-tar sheen on them and the once cream carpet was dark gray and gritty with grime. The space was intended to serve a bunker in the event of an emergency, all concrete and no personality. Near the ceiling were long, low windows, no wider than the slits in a castle turret, letting in weak, watery light. Without any fresh air circulation, the stagnant aroma rendered the basement dungeonesque.

Riza sighed, stirring the dust, squinting in the meagre light allowed by the tiny windows as she perused the cabinets and shelves for Bradley's file –– an old administrative order which failed to appear in the Amestrian register some thirty years ago, published to keep the public informed on federal regulations and presidential actions. Hawkeye wasn't entirely sure why the order piqued Bradley's interest, but she had been in no state of mind to protest a reprieve from the creature's stifling presence. Besides, if he needed a file from storage, then he probably had a good reason. She had been glad at the time to be free of the Homunculus's company. Rare were the occasions where he lengthened her leash...

However, as she pulled out a cabinet drawer, and her blond hair turned momentarily gray behind the dust, Riza wondered if perhaps her elation had been premature. She stifled a sneeze and tried to make out the file names under the grime and waterstains of neglect.

After a few moments of silent perusal, Riza took a long, slow breath, lamenting the taste of filth on her tongue. Without looking up from the index, she reached behind her and took a gun from her back holster, a .45 automatic pistol. She raised it to shoulder height and pointed it down the canyon of bookshelves, her stance adjacent to her aim.

"It's not very polite to sneak up on someone unannounced," she said quietly, straining her ear towards the end of the aisle, to the figure obscured by shadow. "Even if I don't shoot you, a scream would bring someone down here in less than twenty seconds." She allowed herself a tiny, insolent smirk, little more than a twitch of her lips. "And if you're sneaking around, I can't imagine you're terribly keen on being discovered."

Riza felt a definite malign presence in the room, and while she was on her guard, she wasn't afraid. So long as she was Bradley's hostage, she was immune to––

"I always imagined our reunion being a little less... dusty, Miss Sniper."

Her flesh crawled. Riza abandoned the cabinet entirely and turned square to the corridor, hand steady around her pistol. Two tattooed hands rose from the shadows, just as they had done on a baking siltstone rooftop so long ago. A lean, hungry figure followed, dressed in white. His face was thinner from his time in prison, his chin scratchier, but his eyes were the same. A strange blue-purple, the color of wet ink in the dimly-lit basement. He threw her a narrow slash of a smile, but kept his hands raised.

"You're supposed to be in prison," said Riza slowly, meticulously.

He chuckled. "You know, people keep telling me that, as though the effect of repetition upon reality will somehow alter its state." He tried to approach her––

"Don't. I will not hesitate to shoot you."

Solf J. Kimblee's teeth were as white as his suit, near glowing in the gloom. "Shooting an unarmed man, Lieutenant? That doesn't seem your style at all. Then again..." His voice didn't rise in his consideration. If anything, it lowered, sliding sedately over her inner ear. "Murdering innocents was rather your bread and butter at a not so distant point in the past, was it not?"

"You're delusional as well as insane, Kimblee," she seethed, "if you think you're in any way innocent."

"I am as innocent as I am insane, Lieutenant."

She flicked the safety off as he took a step nearer.

"You seem discomposed," he noted benignly.

"Sharing a dark room with a mad bomber has that effect." To her horror, she found she had to bite back against the urge to add his old honorific.

He hummed to himself. "Well, allow me my theatrics, Miss Hawkeye. As with everything I do, there is a purpose in them."

"Which is?"

"You were quite right... though we serve the same master, I should not be seen speaking with you."

After a moment's hesitation, Hawkeye began to lower her firearm. Kimblee was complicated, quite probably insane, and so ruthlessly intelligent he had a tendency to tie her thoughts into knots... but he was not disingenuous. He didn't make a habit of lying. She pointed her gun at the floor, and engaged the safety.

"That's better," he crooned. "Let's have a civilized conversation, shall we?"

"The same master..." began Riza, ignoring him, "you mean Bradley."

"Quite."

She glared at him. "So you thought, considering the lesser degrees of separation, you'd stop by to... to what? To catch up?"

Kimblee's wide, toothy grin suddenly vanished. He stared at her intensely, his strange, heavy-lidded eyes bolting her to the floor.

"I came here to give you a warning, Lieutenant," he said cooly. "There are plans in motion."

"I am aware of that."

"The creatures who live in the shadows of this world are on the move. Your precious Colonel gambled, and now he's lost that which is most dear to him. My employers allow him his life because they need him for something more. He is essential to their plans. You, however, are not. The Homunculi are fastidious creatures, Lieutenant. Bradley is mindful of cleaning up after his messes. But the Führer has indulged me to an extent, allowing me my attachés and a certain autonomy in my movements. If you leave with me, now, you can escape Mustang's fate."

"I accepted those consequences long ago, Kimblee. There is nowhere the Colonel can go where I will not follow."

"Even to his death? And yours?"

"Rather to my death than with you." Riza made no effort to mask her revulsion and hatred, etched in harsh lines across her face.

"How nauseatingly selfless of you," he said dryly, lip curling. "When I spoke to you of accepting one's duty, I was not referring to throwing yourself on the pyre and burning right alongside your beloved Flame Alchemist. The poetry of it is far too saccharine. I don't suppose there is chance of your reconsidering? It seems an awful waste."

"Impossible."

"Impossible... I never much cared for that word. Rather too much like improbable, implacable..." a narrow, pink tongue flicked across his teeth. " _Incorruptible_."

"You're repulsive."

Riza couldn't suppress a little thrill of satisfaction at seeing Kimblee bridle at the word, affronted.

"I used to think I knew forgiveness, Kimblee… but when my mind turns to you, none of it is there. You knew what you were doing. People suffered, and you drank it like a fine wine, becoming intoxicated on your own power. You murdered Amestrian soldiers... my friends."

"Do you remember why?" he asked, thoughtfully, almost wistfully, as though even as he spoke he was stepping through that smoke-choked crater in his mind's eye.

Riza froze. "What?"

"Do you remember why I killed them? Come now, Riza, I told you."

She swallowed. "You said..." the ice in her veins had congealed to a slow-moving sludge, making movement nearly impossible; some awful foreboding pressed down upon her chest, making it difficult to breathe, "you killed them because you could."

"Yes." He stalked closer, his long rope of hair falling over one shoulder. It had grown longer since Ishval, his bangs falling in two probing antenna over his eyes. "My heresy, I suppose, can be likened to a pressure cooker, Miss Hawkeye. There are moments in life when it all becomes a bit too much, even for me, and some things –– and some people –– have to get turned inside out. What is real becomes unreal..."

With each utterance, he stepped closer to her. Riza felt numb, caught in the claustrophobia of the bookcases and in the orbit of the Alchemist padding around her striken body, circling like a raven.

"And what is unreal, _unimaginable_ , even, becomes tangible," he went on, his words a low dulcet, tickling the hairs falling from the back of her bun, "and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological handle on the state of things are rendered silly and indulgent. In other words, Miss Hawkeye...

He bent his head as though meaning to do the unthinkable, but stopped short. With his mouth hovering over hers, he murmured, " _Everything_ is impossible... until it happens."

It was preternatural, thought Riza, despairingly. The way he managed to both offend and tease, frighten her away and draw her in, tempt her with promises of sweet oblivion, then overwhelm her as he squirmed past her defenses like the desert wind through so many screens of thin chitin. Dissolving her will, invading her tired spirit so utterly that it became difficult to recall a life that she ever lived without him in it. He had an insidious way of convincing those who tickled his fancy that his invasion was all their own doing, that they had, in some twisted way, invited him.

In his proximity, he had fogged the part of her brain that reasoned, that understood right from wrong. He had ensnared her with his warm, honeyed words, and, worst of all, he had become something familiar. All at once, Riza found herself in thrall to the very thing that most terrified her. And she had scarcely noticed the shift: always, there was something dangerously seductive in his deconstructions, the knowledge that he'd been watching her, learning her, learning _from_ her, that he understood all the dark twists and turns that made up her mind, and wouldn't hesitate to unravel them.

To have Solf J. Kimblee inside your head was to be half in love with disaster.

He raised a single tattooed palm, brought it close to her face.

Riza's first thought was that he was going to kill her, make her combust. The one that immediately followed, so close to the first that they were near indistinguishable, was that he was going to kiss her.

Perhaps both.

With the feathery gray darkness pressing against them, he put the tips of his fingers on her face, rested them there like he was hovering over piano keys.

"Miss Sniper, " he murmured. "Are you going to save the world?"

"Yes," she whispered, caught in his gaze. Something almost human crept into his eyes, then, coloring the dark indigo –– a shadow of something akin to pity, to regret. Riza hurried to investigate the sudden shift. Exhausted and frightened, the effort came too late. The emotion disappeared before she could identify it, like she had been reaching for something already snatched by the wind, rising up into the sky and lost forever.

Kimblee looked satisfied with the response, as though he knew what she was going to say, had factored even her small, scared words into the complicated minutiae of his calculations. "I wouldn't expect any less of you," he said quietly. "Still, I can't fault myself for asking."

He retreated from her, allowing her to breath again. As Riza fought the urge to steady herself against a bookshelf, he inclined his head, smirking a little.

"I have business with Scar in the north. If our paths cross again, Riza Hawkeye, and I suspect they will, it will be under... _unfriendly_ circumstances, and that will pain me very much indeed. In the meantime, protect your Colonel; he needs you... more than you know."

He bowed to her, and turned towards the aisle of books, his white coat tails flapping around him.

He hummed to himself in the darkness.

Riza watched until he disappeared, until she heard the corridor door close behind him. Her spine seemed to lose its cohesion, and she melted backwards into the shelving unit, before sinking to the floor.

"You should know that I would do anything to protect him, Kimblee," she whispered hoarsely, tasting salt on her lips. "After all... you're the one who created me."

All at once, every iota of her attention, her thoughts, her wilfful soul, was turned to Roy Mustang. Every dream, hope, and ambition of her life combined with his own, transforming their drives into some great conflagration of emotion that burned brightly inside her. It terrified her, at times, that her duty to that man held such immense power over her. She had never wanted to love anyone this way –– it brought her no comfort or happiness, only the painful understanding that Solf J. Kimblee was right... that for all their devotion to each other, for all their promises, if Bradley had his way, Roy was almost certain to lose her. And the thought of leaving him behind, relinquishing him to the throes of anger and grief, as poor, poor Maes had done, nearly kept her sitting on the floor. She wanted to sleep. Curl up at Solf J. Kimblee's feet and sleep forever.

The circle had not yet closed, and the wheel would continue to roll, and a part of her would _always_ will Roy Mustang to succeed. She would live within him forever, love him forever. His goals constituted the repository of all they could become, and she would defend them until the very breath was cut out of her.

Slowly, shakily, Riza Hawkeye rose to her feet. She stepped towards the well-lit corridor, locking the archive room door behind her, and made her way towards Bradley's office with his file in hand. Tomorrow was another day, and there was a lot of work to do.

The Colonel was waiting for her.

As Riza navigated Central Command, she hummed quietly to herself, a sad song lifting, weightless like light, into the air, a butterfly upon her hand, a voice of truth within her mind.

 **The End**


End file.
